OT: Is sendmail safe for SMTP?

[Denis Beauchemin]

Peter Farrow a écrit :
> Ronny T. Lampert wrote:
>>> No offence taken, just wondered/interested if someone had given you 
>>> a reason not to use it, in which case I would be interested to hear 
>>> what it might have been...
>>
>> Just to add some 2 (euro) cents...
>>
>> sendmail's configuration "system" was a complete turn-off to me.
>> postfix was a breeze to configure and also seems much more cleaner by 
>> design.
>> Bad / non-fully transparent configuration options more often than not 
>> cause security problems - more than bad code.
>> That coupled with sendmail's long history of security problems...
>>
>> Postfix also spots excellent documentation, both online and printed.
>> If you're feeling generous just purchase "The Book Of Postfix".
>>
>> *ALL* maps can be whatever you like them to be.
>> LDAP'ing my users (from an AD) was easy as never thought.
>> Restricting access internal mail groups - easy!
>>
>> Reconfiguring is instant and no more m4 runs and macro stuff and 
>> whatnot. Almost all parameters you can ever imagine are changeable.
>>
>> Performance-wise e.g. it does away with many unnecessary DNS lookups 
>> etc.
>>
>> OK, I sound somewhat as an advocate, but postfix has made my life easy.
>> I'm a better person now - less grumpy ;-)
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Ronny
>>
> Sendmail is a complete piece of cake to use and configure, took me 
> about 2hours to get the hang of it and I never looked back...
>
> There is a very good reason its the number 1 MTA for 25 years...  More 
> importantly the amount of plugins, configuration tips and online help 
> is massive compared to other mailers.  If someone writes a piece of 
> email code, it will nearly always come with instructions for Sendmail.
>
> That said its all down to choice, but to say that Sendmail is 
> complicated and difficult to learn doesn't hold water in my book, but 
> there again it depends on each individuals circumstances, if I had to 
> use a different mailer the only other choice is Exim.
> Sendmail is like masochism you learn to love it the end....and I'm 
> really happy :-)
>
My 2 CDN cents (almost worth as much as 2 US cents these days!):

I inherited our sendmail setup 5-6 years ago and almost every time I 
tried to modify something I had to spend lots of time reading the 900+ 
pages sendmail bat book or Googling around.  Sendmail's website is a 
piece of crap where you almost never find what you are looking for.  As 
for Google results, most of the time they don't apply to our setup or 
sendmail version.

I tried to switch to Postfix but had to go back to sendmail because the 
LDAP schema we use for sendmail cannot be accessed in Postfix... This 
was really unfortunate because my limited Postfix experience convinced 
me that Postfix is way more easy to configure than sendmail's arcane MC 
or CF files.

Nonetheless I think that sendmail is a secure MTA but it is really a 
PITA to configure!

Denis

-- 
   _
  °v°   Denis Beauchemin, analyste
 /(_)\  Université de Sherbrooke, S.T.I.
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