> Some design decisions were right. Some started out right and became wrong as the world changed. Some were dubious and haven't become any less so.
Full marks to anyone who can look back and honestly say as much. I went in skimming to see if there would be discussion of the security and correctness issues that sendmail became unfortunately infamous for, and I really appreciate them being discussed at reasonable length. (And I say that without judgment; I've certainly shipped enough things that lasted long enough for me to realize the errors that I had made in their design and/or implementation.)
The intro describing the history of computers and networking is really interesting to read! It was all before my time, but it truly sounds like it was the equivalent of the Wild West, with so many different architectures and standards. It must have been quite the curious experience to be in the middle of all that!
I used it a couple weeks ago when I just wanted to replace a few values in a template file in an automated way. I used sed at first until the number of values involved made it awkward. I certainly didn’t want to bother with jinja or mustache etc for this trivial little case. M4 was there and handy.
But I’d rather swallow my own tongue than use it to configure Sendmail again. Postfix had many compelling features that made me want to switch to it. None were as insta-buy as comparing its configuration language to Sendmail’s.
Only because of the amount of abuse performed using it...
I have fond memories rewriting sendmail.cf and mc files on BSD. Ran servers on pc hardware and mirrored hdd drives; they pushed mail like nobody's business.
If the Exchange box fell over at the weekend, sendmail would sit there patiently waiting (screaming DEFERRED silently to log) with tens of thousands of mails until it came alive again, and push them out in minutes, faster than Exchange could receive (I remember spamming #sendmail -q and you could watch the disk activity freak out on exchange ) .
Confident sendmail is best mta ever. Do the big players use something else these days?
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Edit to add an ai poem for my favourite mta -
Sendmail is not a simple mail app
It's a mighty mail transfer agent that can adapt
It can process SMTP commands and deliver mails
To any destination that it can access
Sendmail is flexible and extendable
It can be modified to fit any goal or role
It can sort, redirect, transform, and control mails
With its intricate rulesets and macro code
Sendmail is better than MS exchange
It's more secure, dependable, and swift
It's the default MTA for many Linux systems
And it's free and open source, unlike its rival's gift
My company used sendmail to interface with our one very large and several smaller web sites that interfaced with our C applications running the whole business. Any other mail software required too much fiddling to get an interface to work, if it was possible at all.
Full marks to anyone who can look back and honestly say as much. I went in skimming to see if there would be discussion of the security and correctness issues that sendmail became unfortunately infamous for, and I really appreciate them being discussed at reasonable length. (And I say that without judgment; I've certainly shipped enough things that lasted long enough for me to realize the errors that I had made in their design and/or implementation.)