On 4/11/06, John Jones <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I am not sure why so many people are down on qmail. It is an > *extremely* secure MTA and also extremely stable.
Background: I ran sendmail for about 4 years then qmail for about 5 years and finally postfix for the last four years. So, I have some idea about what I'm talking about. That out of the way, here is what I see is wrong with qmail and why I don't use it anymore. 1. Insistence upon dictating policy. The local system administrator should be the one to dictate policies like where do binaries go, yet qmail insists on hard coding them into C code and even provides their own C programs to enforce it. 2. Too much complexity. While qmail is indeed less complex (to configure at least) than sendmail, it is still way too complex. The insistence upon having every configuration option in a different file is just insane. Most qmail administrators have absolutely no clue about what does what in their configuration. 3. Non standardized behavior. Why in the world does qmail accept an e-mail, close the socket (thereby indicating to the delivering server that it will be queued for delivery) and *then* generate a bounce, which will often go back to the wrong person because qmail does absolutely no checking to see if the e-mail address is forged or not. This behavior is absolutely inexcusable and cannot be changed to do the standard behavior of rejecting before closing the socket so that an extraneous bounce isn't generated. 4. Qmail was a fine mailer, for the '90s but time has passed it by. Mail programs these days are at a minimum expected to support both SSL/TLS and authentication, yet qmail does not without patching. How about storing your information in ldap? Better get out the patch command. Oh, and what happens if you have two patches that interfere with each other (this happened to me more times than I want to remember)? Well, I hope you remembered to bring a paddle because you're way up a creek without any help. Qmail just doesn't support what a modern mailer need to support, which brings me to my last point. 5. Qmail is abandonware. The author, Daniel Bernstein, has completely stopped work on it and the license he placed on it means that no one else can do any work on it either. If someone else wants to provide more features or fix bugs, they must distribute their changes as patches and are not allowed to provide binaries. If people are providing binaries, (and I'm sure they are) they are going against the license. We get upset when people break the GPL and other licenses so to not do the same for the qmail license is hypocritical in the extreme. Based on those five things and many others, I STRONGLY recommend people stay away from qmail. There are much better alternatives these days, like postfix. How can you not like a mailer where the author is extremely helpful on the mailing lists and very willing to listen to questions, comments, criticisms, or whatever? I guarantee you won't get that from DJB. Cheers, Tanner Friends don't let friends use qmail. -- Tanner Lovelace clubjuggler at gmail dot com http://wtl.wayfarer.org/ (fieldless) In fess two roundels in pale, a billet fesswise and an increscent, all sable. -- TriLUG mailing list : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug TriLUG Organizational FAQ : http://trilug.org/faq/ TriLUG Member Services FAQ : http://members.trilug.org/services_faq/
