IRIX and Software

* Postfix: Your mail can now have the distinction of being deleted by 53 individual subservers

* Sendmail: Priority treatment if you can write, while holding down your Shift key, an m4 macro to calculate the airspeed velicoty of an unladen swallow. All other messages will be summarily deleted in 6-8 weeks, or whenever the queue daemon catches up, whichever is later

* Exim: Conveniently marks every message as "unrouteable" to reduce the hassle of making up reasons to bounce mail

* Courier: Promptly delivers, but then quickly hides, all mail

* Qmail: Might actually receive mail from DJB. The rest of the world will receive rude, copyrighted bounce messages.

* Exchange: Storing mail is irrelevant since the server isn't up often enough to actually receive any. This server is also perfectly secure unless it is running.

I didn't get the Postfix joke?

Making fun of its (almost excessively) modular nature.

I'm a sendmail dweeb, but then, I can actually write my own sendmail rules. I don't even use the m4 processor to write sendmail.cf; it just gets in the way. (But then, if you can understand Perl, you can write sendmail rules. )

From the postfix manual page:



In seriousness though, postfix has been awesome to configure and use, even for my obscure, small-scale scenario. I love it.

Oi. I'm impressed. I used sendmail for one summer, the guy who wrote it had to be from a different universe.

Agree with duck, postfix is pretty nice. And it runs on Irix I ran all our mail on an O2 for a long time, until dealing with the morons in the US got to be too exhausting. "It's from Chiiiina ! Must be spam !"

Stupid shits. Over 50% of the world's spam originates in the US and the major telecoms are the ones at fault. Spam would be very easy to stop, just like cell phone thefts, if they wanted.

Postfix or Exim will be fine for most folks. Out of the two I'd recommend Postfix - Wietse tried hard to make it logical and most won't notice the performance hits from the extreme modularity. Postfix and UW IMAPd should do for most folks. If you don't mind using free versions of commercial software there's the community edition of Communigate - friends have liked it and used it, handles IM/VoIP stuff in addition to email.

I use sendmail for an MTA, a handful of milters, and Cyrus for the mailstore. It's massive overkill for a few mailboxes in each of a couple of domains, but I like the flexibility. Most people would rather not be bothered, nor should they.

I used to work for Sendmail, Inc. I suppose in a way I was paid to write rulesets, but I always preferred to use a FEATURE() or a milter, if that was a viable option. Claus Aßmann, a senior engineer at Sendmail and contributor to sendmail, has said that people should think of the .cf file as a binary file that shouldn't be messed with (use the m4 files instead). Unless you have a need I'd agree, but then I come back to comments about APL and Perl - it's not impossible, it's just very very tedious...

When I first encountered sendmail in 1989 it was pretty much the only thing that could do all that it did, as well as it did it, except maybe MMDF/PMDF. Both of which still exist in some form or another, PMDF in two different commercial flavors (Sun JEMS -> Oracle Communications Messaging Server, and Process Software).


Milters :
greylist-milter - delaying unknown connections a few minutes to discourage spammers
sid-milter - SPF and Sender-ID
opendkim-milter - DomainKeys Identified Message (DKIM)
SpamAssassin - classic anti-spam filtering
opendmarc - DMARC layers policy atop SPF and DKIM, combats phishing

I hand-wrote an enhanced greetpause and RBL support for my own local sendmail. Of course, I devoured the O'Reilly sendmail book when I bought it.

The only place I ever saw MMDF was SCO.

C'mon in, water's fine, nuthin' ta hurt ya in heah, boy ...

Hmm... Is that a banjo I hear off in the distance?

At least its not dueling banjos. You wouldn't want that.

I did some dovecot stuff a life-time ago and it was a cake walk at the time, but that was Linux.

I also did some sendmail.cf stuff even further back in the dim dark distance past and the guy I worked with loved warped and weird arcane stuff and with a guru-ninja-sendmail-freak at hand it was manageable almost enjoyable.

These days I rely on webmail and let someone else play with mail servers while I attempt to get real stuff done.

R.

Yes, that must be why I didn't get the joke, Postfix is so easy to set up, and it just works.

hamei, you didn't know Eric Allman wrote Sendmail? Words fail me!

Of course I knew that ! one of the Allman brothers ... played bass, right ?

Ha ha yeah! Um no, their bassist was Berry Oakley. And I didn't have to look that up...

I spent a few minutes searching the crocs! ...very nice picture, BTW!

Jumping Crocodile Cruise on the Adelaide River, NWT Australia: http://www.jumpingcrocodile.com.au/ Anyone been on it?

Close ...

Where the crane flies through the marshes
And the turtles sun their shells
Where the water rat goes swimmin'
That's where my swamp girl dwells.

Where the sunlight never wanders
And the moonlight never falls
Where the water's black with the devil's track
That's where my swamp girl calls.

What did she say there
The girl with the golden hair
To make me follow her down there ?
How did she look when she took me by the hand ?

Tonight her hair will float in the water
And the gold will no longer shine
It will spread like a fan in the water
While she makes a mysterious sign.
I have seen that sign before

Her eyes aren't like the whippoorwill
And her eyes aren't like the fawn
Her eyes are like the diamondback
Stretchin' in the dawn ...