Re: qmail appliance

This is so completely offtopic...but I am tired this morning and
thought, WTF, let me spew because I haven't spewed.

Casey Allen Shobe - please don't take too much offense.

On Fri, Aug 12, 2005 at 07:53:37AM +0000, Casey Allen Shobe wrote:
> On Thursday 11 August 2005 17:31, Tom Diehl wrote:
> > Not likely. Please keep in mind that qmail has not been
> > maintained for a long time. IMO is is long past its expiration
> > date. In this day and age you need an mta that is capable of
> > rejecting a message before it accepts it, if for instance the
> > mailbox does not exist. Qmail accepts all mail then if it cannot
> > deliver a message trys to bounce it. Spammers love qmail!! It
> > unloads their machines and bandwidth and makes yours work harder.
>
> Well this is a complete load of crock. Qmail is still the most
> solid and efficient MTA for many purposes, and is still by far one
> of the most popular MTA's in use.

Define 'most popular'.

Could you cite your references claiming that 'Qmail is still the most
solid and efficient MTA for many purposes' and 'by far one of the most
popular MTAs in use'? I think Exchange will win...with Sendmail
following, then a whole slew of other MTAs, then Qmail... But finding
objective references to this is getting harder and harder.

Just because the qmail webpage states it is #2 doesn't mean that is
true. In fact, it is patently false.

(reference: http://www.qmail.org/top.html - claims 2nd most popular
MTA on the Internet. bad bad bad djb, bad.)

> Whether you like it or not, qmail is a perfectly valid and
> fully-functional MTA. It requires that you know what you're doing.
> If you want a single config file, look elsewhere.

Qmail is the Linux of MTA systems. (read way down to find my reason
for this comparison)

It is used by people who want to put *time* into their configurations
and to constantly need to update them because they like change.

And the job security...

Of course, this is just my opinion, just like this whole message.

> Many still use sendmail, which is much more arguably far "past it's
> expiration date", as you put it.

The more current sendmail releases are far and above more popular by
numbers than qmail on the 'net as a whole in my experience.

As far as it being ready for retirement, I would have agreed 4 years
ago but things have changed.

Too bad Qmail hasn't.

Hell, the milter interface is one of the coolest things I have seen in
MTAs, and it would be cool if we had the same kind of thing available
in other MTAs.

INN of old did the same kind of thing with its 'perl' (and there was a
time for TCL as well) filtering capabilities. Diablo, the Highwinds
products, DNEWS, none of them have this. Yet there are those that say
INN is ready for retirement as well.

> Qmail and Dspam can most certainly be used together to create an
> appliance. I don't like the appliance approach personally, but it's
> certainly possible.

I don't remember reading anything as black and white stating that
Qmail and DSPAM can *not* be used together to create an appliance.

With Qmail, you can create job security, because no one else will know
how the hell it was working.

Remember, these are my opinions and my opinions only. Anyone else who
wants to use these opinions is welcome to, they are in the public
domain (which is far more fun than open source :).

I know I sound argumentive, but you are making a lot of black and
white statements, and I wish to counter them as blatant evangelism.

I respect your opinion for your own subjective reasons. I do not
respect your bold statements based on objective reasons.

Why? You make your B/W statements and evangelize because that is the
Linuxish way. There isn't a need to do that on this mailing list or
any other, it is just silly. You don't need to *sell* us your
opinion, nor do you need to broadcast it loudly from the shared pulpit
because you have made a specific choice.

Personally, I am a Postfix whore, for many reasons. I used to use
smap, and later, sendmail, in production for ISP mail servers. Then
this thing called 'vmailer' was announced - and I thought it was cool,
but had about 1/100th the functionality of sendmail (lots of custom
.cf rules - screw you m4 pussies!!!... :).

Then...Postfix (the big renaming!) was released, and it was even more
fun, and I still thought it was cool. But not ready for prime time.
At all.

In 2000, I converted 30K mailboxes from sendmail mbox format to
Postfix using Maildir format (thanks DJB, for Maildir, but nothing
else). By the time I left that company, it was close to 40K mailboxes
and 2500+ domains. (4 years - that's the problem with selling out
sometimes, you lose your ability to create and innovoate - so not much
growth for my old company)

My current gig is only 15K addresses (12K mailboxes) and 900 domains
generating ~2GB (of delivered) per day of email with over 1.5M SMTP
probes per day (thank you greylisting!), but Postfix will be there to
make sure I can scale to 100K+, if the world likes me.

But perhaps a year from now, something new will come out. I am
conservative when it comes to systems administration (and inherently
lazy - I don't want to fuck with systems all the time - they need to
run and operate correctly, I should *not*, and do *not*, want to spend
hours each day being an admin) but perhaps something will change
enough that I'll stop whoring out to the Postfix MTA and jump over to
something else. I manage almost 70 systems now, myself, ranging from
M$ 2K and 2K3 servers to FreeBSD and Solaris boxes. I spend less than
2 hours per week acting as a systems administrator. This is a good
thing(tm).

My last Qmail installation was for 3500 mailboxes and 250 domains
because the end user wanted to use vpopmail. This set of systems (3
not counting the fileserver) caused me 3-4 hours *per week* of
maintenance. Why? Oh, qmail queues filling up and 'oh, I can only do
20 concurrent connections outbound and forget connection caching, but
lets tune and see what happens), etc. I actually ended up shimming
the system to take outbound email and pump it through an instance of
Postfix to increase outbound mail delivery by a factor of 100x. Even
inbound was painful, but workable. I do not profess to be a big Qmail
person and I am sure I could have done some things differently, but I
am not an idiot and this MTA was causing me headache after headache.

Qwest is a big qmail user and I am happy for them. Through all of
their trials and tribulations...and they have many people dedicated to
just the mail system. Again, good for them!

That system above..the Qmail one...I converted it Postfix, dumped
vpopmail (such a cool base system, horribly done to do things the
qmail way and not configurable with other MTAs at all), grabbed
Postfixadmin (which we have now hacked so much that 85% of the code is
brand new), and merged it into my current cluster. I am now no longer
wasting my time. This is also a good thing(tm).

Bonus for me (and other users of Postfix, Sendmail, or a myriad of
other MTAs), we don't have a shitload of '.' files lying around
burning up inodes. We don't have rampant environment variables
floating around to help 'direct' things. We don't have to burn 3
inodes for each mail message. We can make wholescale changes to the
system without recompiling, applying a shitload of patches, and
burning up even more inodes because of the archaic 'let us have 100
config files', or have to rewrite scripts because this version of
/bin/bash is different than that version of /bin/bash and it caused
mail delivery to fail.

My suggestion - live and let live. You like Qmail - great! Please,
enjoy it and have a great time. Tell us why you like it, give us your
subjective opinion on things. Please, don't make bold, blatant
evangelistic statements.

I am a Postfix user. I feel good about myself.

Now, as to the references to Linux I make above...while not very nice,
is based on my experence with the current crop of 'admins' out there
in the world. I watch people who are actually quite smart play with
Linux and try to run businesses on Linux - and I almost cry sometimes
because of the amount of time they spend futzing with things, bringing
machines back online after crashes - and blaming the hardware for the
crash! I think it is sad. Not all users of Linux have these issues,
but enough do in my experience that I feel Linux causes so much time
to be burned because of the constant changes, crashes, and other
abnormalities. It is the mentality in my opinion.

But I don't believe that I have better options for those users. I
love to go head to head with friends of mine using the same hardware,
doing things to machines that really should be outlawed, learning from
them new ways to do things, them learning from me. In the end, I
stick with FreeBSD and Solaris, they stick with Linux, and we still
sleep at night.

I just found out a friend of mine decided to make the big jump from
Sendmail to Exim. Wow. I look forward to seeing him soon and finding
out his reasons for this massive jump. And he is a Linux user :)

Sorry for the bandwidth wasting...

-- 
Mike Horwath, reachable via drechsau@Geeks.ORG