>> > But "basic sendmail" is an oxymoron!  ;-)
>> 
>> No, it's absolutely not.  sendmail as included in Unix OS distributions
>> for many a year has fulfilled the purpose required of it just fine,
>
>Anything that requries a 1500-page guide to describe its idiosyncracies
>isn't likely very "basic".  Anything that includes a very hard-to-
>program programmable finite state machine as it's core concept is not
>"basic".

in sendmail's defense (i like sendmail :), sendmail's book is no
longer "the biggest".  the new perl book beats it in terms of pages,
and it already had rivals in terms of sheer size (the graphic file
formats book, the "practical unix and internet security" book, and
more).

another thing about the sendmail book is the ~100 pages on the
possible values one can pass to -d for debugging purposes that
costales insisted on including in the book.

>> and
>> nobody has presented any justification for replacing it with postfix
>> beyond "but I like postfix and I think it's better than sendmail".
>
>I guess we thought that was obvious.  I'd suggest reading the code if
>you really need convincing, but in general the overview and anatomy docs
>available on www.postfix.org should be reasonably convincing.  There's
>quite a pile of positive testimony from Postfix users too....

people like both of them, and will continue to do so.

>> In many systems I prefer not to install my preferred MTA, because I can
>> use the included MTA for the basic functionality which is required.
>> sendmail works just fine for me for that purpose, and I have absolutely no
>> desire to learn about the dozen+ daemons in postfix or the postfix
>> configuration, or postfix queue management etc.  If there was a compelling
>> reason for replacing sendmail with postfix I wouldn't be complaining, but
>> there is just absolutely no justification at all.  Why fix something
>> that's not broken?
>
>many people, even some of its fans I think, consider sendmail "broken by
>design"
> 
>However the mere fact that there are many good choices of MTA other than
>sendmail should be an indication that something needs fixing, broken or
>not.



>>  Seems like it's just a personal crusade by a few
>> postfix fans :(
>
>Basically what I'm hearing from you is that sendmail is a sacred cow and
>it must not be touched.

depends on how you listen to it.  i hear a bunch of people saying that
it does what they want and they know how to use it, so please don't
remove it since it's been there for years.

of course...unix also used to come with a c compiler.  how many
commercial unix systems still do, now that susv2 has marked it
"legacy", and therefore, not "required".

   http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007908799/xcu/intro.html#tag_001_003_003

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