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Comment by rasengan | Hacker News Reader

I respect sendmail. Obviously there are other MTAs like djb’s Q mail, postfix as well as newer ones written in Go and Rust. Sure sendmail has had its share of vulnerabilities. But it’s the falls it suffered that made every other MTA strong.

Let’s respect the software of the past. It’s the past’s software that built today’s software.

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Agree. The hardest thing in the world (besides configuring sendmail) is to remember that other peoples' use cases are not necessarily my use case. The world of email was a whole lot different back when sendmail was created.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email#History

> The world of email was a whole lot different back when sendmail was created.

Sure, email in 80s was different than in the 90s. The problem with sendmail is that it didn't get replaced when it really wasn't a good fit anymore and instead it got dragged on for extra 30 years.

The future does build on the past.

Here's a nugget from Andrew Lee aka rasengan's past:

https://gauravgiri.com/for-the-record/a.bad.habit.pdf

And his future:

https://twitter.com/grvgr/status/1586942591249141762

No. Let it die and stand over the grave to make sure it stays dead. Even 20 years ago there were better alternatives; Debian sensibly defaulted to Exim.

It's always been a horrendously difficult to configure monolith.

> But it’s the falls it suffered that made every other MTA strong.

Worth remembering that Sendmail was, generally speaking, first. Shoulder of giants and all that.

Sendmail wasn't really the first per se, but it was the first that worked well. In the early 80s there were a lot of competing email protocols and systems and implementations, and Sendmail could talk to all of them, in a "bug-compatible" way. This is also why sendmail.cf is so bewilderingly flexible and complex.

Later email systems like Postfix and qmail in the 90s had it much easier as they operated in a much simpler ecosystem.

At least MMDF was (a little) earlier. Maybe it lacked some features compared to sendmail? It ran at several university sites at least. It was an early adopter of least-privilege architecture, predating qmail by a lot.

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