[CentOS] How to configure sendmail

[Brian Mathis]

On Sun, Dec 2, 2012 at 6:52 PM, Harold Pritchett <harold at uga.edu> wrote:
> On 12/2/2012 6:08 PM, John R Pierce wrote:
>> On 12/2/2012 2:46 PM, Tilman Schmidt wrote:
>>> Not a good advice for someone who already has some experience
>>> with Sendmail but none with Postfix. He'll have to read docs
>>> either way, but staying with Sendmail spares him the effort
>>> of reinstallation (including probable breakage of his running
>>> installation), and reading the docs of a familiar product
>>> (Sendmail) is much easier than reading the docs of an
>>> unfamiliar one (Postfix).
>> except he doesn't have a working configuration with sendmail and is
>> apparently a novice, so the postfix recommendation is, IMHO, a good one.
>
> Why?  Once upon a time, many years ago, I tried postfix.  I ended up removing it and installing sendmail.  I've been using sendmail since the early 1980's, when we were running the Eric Allman code from UCB on a VAX 780 under BCD Unix.  And, yes, I recognize this as a religious topic and I'm not trying to start a flame war.  Why, in your opinion, is postfix superior to sendmail.
>
>
> Harold
> (who's first linux system was slackware 1.0)


You were probably more comfortable running sendmail because you had a
long history of using it.  I once tried to give emacs a fair shake,
but since I had already used vi for a long time, I didn't like it.
I'm honest enough to say that it was mostly because I was comfortable
with vi, and not that there's anything wrong with emacs [1].

Conceptually, the fact that sendmail requires a makefile and a bunch
of macros just to generate the configuration pretty clearly points to
*something* being wrong, or at least anachronistic, with the design.
Objectively, it performs all of its tasks within the same process,
adding significantly to potential security issues.

Postfix uses simple name=value syntax but can still get as complex as
you need, if you do.  It also segregates functions into different
processes, isolating areas that might pose higher security risks.


❧ Brian Mathis


[1] This is just an anecdote.  Please for the love of Linus do not
reply to the vi vs emacs statement.