Re: Replacing Sendmail with Postfix in the base system

[Matthew Dillon <dillon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

    Claus, I'm not going to get into a long involved argument with you.
    I've been using sendmail for a very long time and, frankly, the fact
    that someone knows that there is a solution to each individual problem
    doesn't actually help the people who are trying to use the program.

    Every single time I've had to make any sort of significant change to my
    mail configuration it has cost me at least a day of hair pulling.  
    Sometimes more then one.  *EVERY* single time.

    Just look at your own answers.  How many different, barely documented
    places do I have to edit to 'solve' all of those problems?   YOU may
    know how to fix them, having written the code, but that doesn't help
    anyone else!

    That has always been the problem with sendmail.  There are literally
    thousands of different places you can poke to solve one problem or
    another, and pretty much the ONLY people who know where all those
    places are or how to poke them without blowing up their mail system are
    the people who wrote the code.

    I am really awefully sick and tired of the whole mess.  I am sick and
    tired of having to spend an entire day going through reams of barely
    readable documentation.  Not just once, but EVERY SINGLE TIME I have
    to do any significant work with sendmail.  None of it sticks.  It's all
    an obtuse, unorganized mess.  I am sick and tired of the lack of
    readable documentation.  I am sick and tired of MC and CF.  I am sick
    and tired of making one small change and having my entire sendmail
    system go down for half a day for not apparent reason.   In the last
    five years I've blown up my mail system four times, and three of those
    times sendmail decided to start rejecting mail completely (not even 
    tempfailing it).  I am sick and tired of single-character options that
    aren't well documented but which basically make or break a configuration.
    I am really sick and tired of obtuse error messages, DNS caches which
    have caused my mail system to stop responding for hours due to a simple,
    short term (few seconds) DNS glitches.  And a thousand other problems.

    Even simple things like listing the mail queue.... oh no, there's no
    simple command for it.  mailq?   Except that doesn't list the client
    queue.  Now you have to do 'mailq -Ac' (what idiot thought up of that
    weird character combination?).   Testing an email route?  It's impossible.
    You have to put sendmail into a crazy ruleset mode and issue a weirdly
    formatted command line to see how an email will be parsed, and even that
    doesn't help half the time.

    The spamfilter isn't much better.  The API is ridiculously complex.  You
    may think it's simple but it is way, way, WAY too complex.  Why is it
    even threaded?  I don't give a flying crap about threading.  I *WANT*
    one process per session, or a simple pipelined set of operations.  I
    *DO* *NOT* *WANT* a threaded spam filter.  I want something simple.  Get
    the mail, return up or down vote.  Get the next mail, reutrn up or down
    vote.  I don't need early termination or 95% of the other hundred
    features in libmilter.

    Nothing sendmail does is even remotely human readable.  Nothing.

    And, remember, this is from a guy who has used sendmail for 20 years
    and is STILL using sendmail! 

						-Matt