Quoting Ian C. Sison ([EMAIL PROTECTED]):

> This site evaluates sendmail performance to be 'LOW'
>       http://mailsoftware.cjb.net/

At best, a bit overdramatic a characterisation.  My very informal tests
suggest that all four MTAs tend to have throughput high enough that differences
really don't matter.

> This site actually has benchmarks of sendmail, postfix and qmail.  Note
> that they are missing some numbers for sendmail, because in their words:
> "Slow implementations are omitted"
> 
>       http://www.kyoto.wide.ad.jp/mta/eval1/eindex.html

A noble effort, but Sendmail 8.9.3's very ancient.  I note this is a
1999 test.  I've heard claims (which I alluded to earlier) of
improvements to Sendmail's queue-handling and delivery algorithms in
much-more-recent versions.

> This site has more relevant data, with a 'mails/second' delivery rate:
> 
>       http://www-dt.e-technik.uni-dortmund.de/~ma/postfix/bench2.html

Sendmail 8.11.x is getting _closer_ to the present, but the current series
is 8.12.  (His figures may still be applicable; I don't know, really.)

> For now the drop priv band aid of sendmail works, but i just wonder
> how long it will.

Well, consider:  In effect, it does some separation of the code into
security-sensitive and non-security-sensitive portions, in the sense
that only a much smaller-than-previously percentage of the code ever 
executes with root authority:  By the time any but a small percentage
of it gets called, root privilege has been dropped for that code
instance.

In general, some of the most-effective ways of achieving better
assurance of security are (1) run less code in a trusted role and (2)
run less-complex code in a trusted role.  Dropping privilege is a
roundabout but still effective way of doing exactly that.

> What i do is to simply make it known that there are better solutions
> to MTA applications than sendmail.

A worthwhile goal -- and I do it myself.

-- 
Cheers,               Everything is gone;
Rick Moen             Your life's work has been destroyed.
[EMAIL PROTECTED]   Squeeze trigger (yes/no)?
                       -- David Carlson (winner, haiku error message contest)
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