why is sendmail the adopted mta?

[Miguel Filipe <miguel.filipe@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi there,

After talking about this on #dragonflybsd@ efnet, and with some
agreace that there are more pleasent, easy and secure mtas out there,
ppl suggested I talked about this in the MLs.

One thing that allways itches in my head is why almost all bsds use
sendmail has the default MTA.

Why do I have gripes with sendmail?
1) Its difficult to configure
2) it has a lousy security track record
3) there are very good (superior) alternatives

Why not use postfix has the default mta?
1) its secure
2) well designed
3) very easy to configure
5) its fast
6) a modern replacement for sendmail
7) widely adopted, and not controvertial..  (osx uses it by default,
heard that netbsd has it in base too).

But there are also other choices: exim; qmail; .... 
And the same way that I'd prefer that sendmail wasn't forced on me
when I install a  dragonflybsd... I don't mind having the choise of
mta on install.. instead of a default one.

A also good solution, instead of adopting some other mta, having the
user too choose the mta on install is also better than having sendmail
installed by default.

Why do I bring this up?
Because I see no good reason to keep using sendmail ... and because I
believe that dragonflybsd is doing a great work adopting and creating
new software solutions that look better than the existing ones....
pf
open ntpd
dragonfly itself .. when comparing to freebsd.

Also since dragonflyBSD aims to be scalable, from smp to numa, and clusters... 
Postfix should scale much better than sendmail in those scenarios
since sendmail is a monolithic program and postfix is a bunch of
little programs that interact with eachother, each one responsible for
a specific function.. (this fits well in the unix way of doing one
small app that does one thing and does it very well).

for those who are not informed about postfix:
http://www.postfix.org/
http://ultra.litpixel.com:84/articles/rswp/frameset.html

In conclusion, I  thought about this because  I think that replacing
sendmail with postfix is a reasonable, racionnal and inovative move
that plays well with the DragonFlyBSD spirit!

greetz to all, thanks for the great work!


PS: sorry for the bad english, not my native language.

-- 
Miguel Sousa Filipe