On 23/11/2007, Minh Van Le <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > Postfix is good
>
> Hey doesn't anybody use Sendmail anymore ?

Some do.

When I started working for some place which was practically windows
people pretending to know a thing or two about Linux one of my first
questions was "why sendmail? it has so many bugs, so many features
nobody needs these days and such a brain-dead configuration scheme"
and they said "that's the legacy we have, it works so we don't fix
it", it turned out that "it works" meant also that the sendmail boxes
were constantly at up to 100.0 load average, dropping tons of
connections, and practically can't cope with the volume of messages
they received, but they though "it works" simply because they didn't
even know how to "ssh mail server w".

With some script tweaking and a couple of days with the sendmail
documentation I was able to bring the machines to a state where they
are hardly loaded and actually one machine can cope with all the load
instead of three (e.g. scripts running every couple of minutes to work
on small chunks of incoming mail instead of once every 15 minutes
having to cope with huge amount of messages, locking processes so the
next cron job will notice that the previous one haven't finished,
configuring a single sendmail queue running process to wake up every 5
minutes instead of firing a new one every hour, etc).

So Sendmail is NOT my first choice when installing an MTA, but it's
not so bad either.

Another example I know is a major ISP that has few dozens of sendmail
servers. They are the most professional Linux people I had the
privilege to work with but again - sendmail works, it would be a huge
task to replace it and the benefits of touching it are not clear so
they stay with it.

--Amos
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