Subject: Re: Mail servers Re: Update Function In CS 1.1 Installer?
schinder@pobox.com
Date: Fri Aug 20 1999 - 06:26:11 MDT
On Fri, Aug 20, 1999 at 08:56:27AM +0200, John L Grantham wrote:
}
} Just out of curiosity, since you mention it, what are the pros and cons
} with sendmail vs. qmail? I'm pretty ignorant of the differences, since I
} more or less mindlessly always use sendmail.
*The* basic difference is that qmail has a robust security model while
sendmail does not. You can look at sendmail's long checkered history
of security exploits at www.cert.org. You might also want to look at
Dan Bernstein's "Sendmail Disasters" page
<ftp://koobera.math.uic.edu/www/maildisasters/sendmail.html>. Dan is
the author of qmail. The only other mail transfer agent that I'd even
consider trusting on any of my machines is Wietse Venema's postfix
(a.k.a "IBM Secure Mailer"), for which Dan also has a disasters page.
When I learned about qmail a few years ago, I installed it immediately
on my Unix boxes at work and gladly dumped sendmail. No more frantic
reinstallations of a new sendmail release after the CERT advisory of
the month. Sendmail has gotten better, but I'm not going to bet that
Allman has finally gotten it right, since the basic problem still
remains. Sendmail is a large, bloated daemon that runs setuid root
and talks to the world. That's just asking for trouble.
There are differences in the configuration, of course. If you're used
to sendmail, it takes a little time to learn the (IMHO, better) qmail
way. You won't find qmail on any major Linux distribution because of
the licensing, but qmail is very easy to install from source. You can
find out more about qmail starting at <http://www.qmail.org/>.
}
} cya
}
} John
}
} ---
}
} John Grantham | Freelance Graphic and Web Designer
} | Dipl.-Designer (FH)
} | Homepage: http://surf.to/multimedia
} | MacLinux: http://www.maclinux.de/
}
}
-- Paul J. Schinder NASA Goddard Space Flight Center schinder@leprss.gsfc.nasa.gov
This archive was generated by hypermail 2a24 : Sun Sep 05 1999 - 13:46:32 MDT