[NTLUG:Discuss] MTA's

[Aaron Goldblatt]

> robust and secure; and tcpwrapper/daemontools are awesome.  Some negatives:  Many of
> the people on the qmail mailing lists are arrogant assholes; there are some RFC

A note on this: If you're careful to fully document everything you've done, provide 
config files and log snippets, undoctored, and clearly outline what it is you're 
wanting to accomplish, what you've tried before, what happened when you tried it, 
and what documentation you've looked at and didn't find what you needed or didn't 
understand, they can be quite helpful.  The mailing list archives are also available 
and well worth a look first.  But they have no mercy on people who say "qmail 
doesn't work" and that's it.

And yes, Dr. Bernstein himself is quite a jerk.

I've used qmail for a couple of years now.  The installation at www.lifewithqmail.org 
relies on another piece of djb's software, called ucspi.  ucspi is intended as a 
replacement for inetd, and is excellent once you learn it.  I personally run an inetd-
free system.

It also depends on another piece of djbware, called daemontools.  daemontools 
attempts to provide a consistent interface to managing daemons (like qmail-smtpd), 
without the need to figure out which signals (HUP, ALRM, etc) do what to any given 
daemon.

Also note that qmail's licence doesn't mesh well with "free software" if you need to 
redistribute it.  You may redistribute verbatium copies of qmail, but you may not 
modify it and distribute your modifications.  In the qmail world, modifications to the 
qmail source are distributed as patches, not as forks.  If you have some need to 
redistribute your changes in public (if any, like in a commercial setting of some 
kind), beware.

ag