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8 years and counting...
by Shaman - Oct 4th 2004 20:47:33
I still use qmail because I have some legacy
software that requires it. But it's time DJB either
gave up the code under BSD or GPL, or we call it a
day and stop recommending it to people. It may be
fairly secure, but it's creaking old with plenty of
performance issues and bind/libc/etc. bugs. If he
isn't going to give up the code, maybe the
community should just post the final known good
patches and give up. All the hacks to add
more modern functionality to qmail are just that -
hacks. This dog doesn't hunt in today's Internet
anymore... much less the IPv6 networks that are
coming. Maybe DJB will see the light some day and
free his babies? Sadly, I doubt it.
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Re: 8 years and counting...
by Nick Leverton - Mar 10th 2005 08:03:49
> maybe the community should just post the final
> known good patches and give up.
The community did bundle qmail with the known good
patches, back in January 2004. Have a look at
http://www.qmail.org/netqmail/
They're still supporting it too.
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about qmail
by Roadmaster - Jan 19th 2002 15:55:41
qmail by itself is a great piece of software. It gets the job done, and
gets it done in a quick, efficient and safe way. Based purely on its
technical merits, it's hard to beat qmail for the one task it performs
(being a mail transfer agent).
Unfortunately, qmail is not perfect, and most of its flaws come from the
author, D.J. Bernstein.
The first thing that strikes a newcomer to the qmail community is how much
like a god DJB feels. He's arrogant, somewhat disrespectful, and in general
acts like he's the only human being in the world who knows what he's
doing.
A lot of qmail's power comes from the fact that it breaks away with most
conventions about MTA's, however that also means that most users will take
some time to get used to how qmail operates. Here, DJB's "that's the
way I did it and if you don't like it you can kiss my ass" attitude
doesn't help one bit.
Also, plenty of issue has been made about qmail's license. It's not free
in the FSF sense of the word, because you're not allowed to distribute
modified versions of qmail. Of course you can make modifications, but
you're limited to distributing those as patches, further increasing the
difficulty level for a qmail installation. DJB maintains control of qmail's
official release, which allows him to keep things working the way he wants
to, but that means a lot of people can't share *their* way of doing things
unless DJB approves.
If you can get over DJB's nastiness, and qmail's non-freeness doesn't
bother you, qmail is really worth a try. Unfortunately bor both the author
and his software, those are two pretty big IFs.
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Re: about qmail
by Mij - Jul 15th 2002 13:49:17
DJB has strange ideas about itself and about how programs should intrude
the system. Keeping the whole qmail "package" (including binary) in
/var/qmail/ could be understood for non-intrusiveness, but what about
keeping djbdns caches under /etc/? That quite frequent in DJB's software.
However, qmail is a great software and it really more simple to use than
how most people think.
It' objectively much better than sendmail. It could be, instead, compared
with courier and such.
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...
by lucipher - Mar 31st 2001 00:04:09
first of all, everything i am writing here are just my impressions about
qmail, every people talked about qmail on irc told that qmail was
easy,fast,secure at that time i started jumping with happyness, all i
wanted was to clean sendmail from my server, then i downloaded qmail and
some needed files, and what i saw was that qmail was real hard to get to
work, i bought the book "running qmail" and finally i get
working, however i tried it among 10 or more times and i didnt work out,
probably i didnt understood some part or something...
--
''Where solitude ignites and dark shadows slain, O' er the soul between the flow from flat sillhouette to darkness again''
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Re: ...
by Rob Mayoff - Apr 5th 2001 20:14:50
Maybe you should try asking for help on the qmail mailing list.
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Re: ...
by Martin - May 11th 2001 17:52:20
> and what i saw was that qmail was real
> hard to get to work, i bought the book
> "running qmail" and finally i
> get working, however i tried it among 10
> or more times and i didnt work out,
> probably i didnt understood some part or
> something...
hmm.. i've qmail installed in about 20 minutes
(with configuration)..
it's also a very good INSTALL file included.. my
english isn't very good but it's easy to
understand.. you can also look at http://cr.yp.to/qmail/faq.html
or http://www.lifewithqmail.org
.. very good pages
regards
martin
--
Martin Proyer
------------------------
martin@proyer.net
http://www.proyer.net
------------------------
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I agree.
by Shaman - Jan 16th 2001 13:58:15
I'm on the web page as a contributor, but I also share your feelings about
DJB and qmail. It's been very stable and I'm loathe to make myself trouble
by going to another package, but it's starting to drive me wild not having
features we need.
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Re: I agree.
by Ward Vandewege - Feb 22nd 2001 18:30:56
> I'm loathe to make myself trouble by
> going to another package, but it's
> starting to drive me wild not having
> features we need.
Well, I'm also a Qmail contributor, and I'm a bit puzzeled about the 'not
having features we need' - name one feature that exists in other MTA's but
not in Qmail? And even if there would be such a thing, what's stopping you
from implementing it? Use the source!!
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Re: I agree.
by Shaman - Mar 8th 2001 14:33:41
Simple. D.J.B.
If I put in the time, etc. to make fixes or extensions, and D.J. won't
accept them or add them, fix them, test them and put an official release
out with the new code.
Development on qmail ended about 4 years ago. Everything else is a
disorganized heap of patches that nobody has put together as being a
complete, updated package. You and I might be able to get qmail to do what
we want (I more or less have), but don't think that because you're "the
shit" that everyone else is, too. Qmail isn't even feature complete...
qmtp can only receive, to send with qmtp you have to hack/patch it.
This project is as dead as the Amiga. The party's still going strong, but
the lights in the house went off quite a while ago. And it pains me to say
that...
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Re: I agree.
by Shaman - Mar 8th 2001 14:49:15
You asked me to talk about what qmail is missing. This is a short list, so
I won't put a lot of time into it.
IMAP4
Feature-complete POP3
ETRN, ATRN, or UDWA
Web interface (of any sort)
IP multihoming
Notification alerts
Antispam (badmailfrom is nearly useless)
LDAP support
ACAP support
All this stuff is important in today's mail servers. Sure, you may
disagree with some of the features I've outlined here, but PEOPLE WANT
THEM. And patching all sorts of incompatible patches together to get
there, plus hacking your own code is just plain, utterly, inapproachable.
Not that a lot of this stuff is available to the qmail package itself.
Some of the hardcore qmail supporters out there have e-mailed me
dispairing of the package's condition.
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Re: I agree.
by Martin - May 11th 2001 17:54:19
> IMAP4
> Feature-complete POP3
> ETRN, ATRN, or UDWA
> Web interface (of any sort)
> IP multihoming
> Notification alerts
> Antispam (badmailfrom is nearly
> useless)
> LDAP support
> ACAP support
no problem.. look at http://www.lifewithqmail.org
regards
martin
--
Martin Proyer
------------------------
martin@proyer.net
http://www.proyer.net
------------------------
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Re: I agree.
by Kjetil T. Homme - May 26th 2001 17:43:49
> no problem.. look at http://www.lifewithqmail.org
Misdirection? Qmail doesn't even support basic stuff such as 8BITMIME or
DSN. djb prefers to invent his own standards, but unfortunately for him,
there are people on the Internet who run software from others.
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Re: I agree.
by Roadmaster - Jan 19th 2002 15:42:16
Qmail is designed with a unix-like philosophy. It does one thing and does
it well. Qmail is an MTA. Some of the features you mentioned (imap4 and
pop3, web interface) have absolutely no place in an MTA. Then again,
sendmail by itself has none of the above, yet there's no complaints about
sendmail. You want imap4 and pop3? get courier-imap. Want a web interface?
there are zillions; I prefer squirrelmail which works great with courier's
imap service.
qmail might not be the holy grail of MTA's; it's very different from what
most users are used to, the license is a bit restrictive, and the author's
arrogance and hostility permeate through most of his software (try reading
documentation for qmail, djbdns and ezmlm and you'll end up both feeling
like you're incompetent, and hating djb's guts for being so mean). But
bashing it for stuff that shouldn't be in qmail in the first place just
shows a bit of bias.
> You asked me to talk about what qmail is
> missing. This is a short list, so I
> won't put a lot of time into it.
>
> IMAP4
> Feature-complete POP3
> ETRN, ATRN, or UDWA
> Web interface (of any sort)
> IP multihoming
> Notification alerts
> Antispam (badmailfrom is nearly
> useless)
> LDAP support
> ACAP support
>
> All this stuff is important in today's
> mail servers. Sure, you may disagree
> with some of the features I've outlined
> here, but PEOPLE WANT THEM. And
> patching all sorts of incompatible
> patches together to get there, plus
> hacking your own code is just plain,
> utterly, inapproachable. Not that a lot
> of this stuff is available to the qmail
> package itself.
>
> Some of the hardcore qmail supporters
> out there have e-mailed me dispairing of
> the package's condition.
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Re: I agree.
by Justin M. - Apr 2nd 2002 14:26:36
I would love TLS support. Only Sendmail has it AFAIK. I have configured it
with Sendmail and it works great. Now I want to replace Sendmail. I looked
at Postfix and qmail, but both need unofficial patches to work. Shouldn't
something as critical as security via encryption be an integral part of any
major service network daemon?
--
Justin M.
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Re: I agree.
by jeff covey - Apr 2nd 2002 20:30:31
> I would love TLS support. Only Sendmail has it AFAIK.
Exim supports TLS,
and it's much easier to set it up under Exim than under Sendmail.
--
vs lbh pna ernq guvf, lbh'er n trrx.
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Re: I agree.
by Daniel Rose - May 7th 2001 20:19:38
% This project is as dead as the Amiga.
> The party's still going strong, but the
> lights in the house went off quite a
> while ago. And it pains me to say
> that...
What then, would you recommend to the majority of users who have neither
the skills nor time to hack the code?
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Re: I agree.
by Snatcher - Mar 22nd 2001 08:53:13
%Well, I'm also a Qmail contributor,
and I'm a bit puzzeled about the 'not
having features we need' - name one
Are you dreaming? There's no such thing as a "Qmail contributor". Where
are your contributions on the source code? Since they are not standard
they're useless, they're dust. Only DJB can modify qmail, with no
"contributors" at all.
So any effort you *may* have done is nothing, probably similar to *many*
others that implemented the *same thing*, throwing a lot of similar code on
the trashcan.
The restrictive Qmail's license created much more Qmail variations than
Sendmail would ever dream! Google can show you that! QMail is expensive,
since it does not integrate efforts. Worse, the costs are tranfered to the
end users, each one forced to have a "QMail development team" to patch and
inspect themselves everything. Simple upgrades turned a replicated (for
each user) nightmare of patching, testing and adjusting.
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Re: I agree.
by Shaman - Mar 28th 2001 14:06:52
Wait a sec:
I'm agreeing with you.
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Re: I agree.
by Snatcher - Mar 28th 2001 15:39:52
> Wait a sec:
>
> I'm agreeing with you.
Yes, I know that. :)
Please look that my reply was on Ward's reply not on yours. :)
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qmail
by Jorge Fuertes - Aug 6th 2000 20:54:58
http://www.maz.es
We are using qmail at our organization. Qmail is perfectly managing
more than 500 accounts with very
heavy traffic.
QMail it's faster and more secure than any other MTA.
The compilation, installation and configuration is trivial in front of
Sendmail.
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Re: qmail
by cal - Oct 18th 2004 19:37:03
> http://www.maz.es
> We are using qmail at our organization.
> Qmail is perfectly managing more than
> 500 accounts with very
> heavy traffic.
> QMail it's faster and more secure than
> any other MTA.
> The compilation, installation and
> configuration is trivial in front of
> Sendmail.
>
good fer ya. from my past experience on qmail, adding new features means
possibly breaking the qmail code. I would say qmail would be good if you
have the time to slowly debug. Not when you want something up, running and
glitchless. within a couple of hours.
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