Is Sendmail on a suicide run? OH PLEASE YES!

There are rumblings about Sendmail and it’s future distribution, both it’s involvement in the IETF and Microsoft circus known as Sender-ID and it’s own new license are topics worthy of discussion and attention, a brief collection of useful links can be found at the OpenBSD Journal.

I normally don’t get involved in subjects like this until it’s community rallying time (such as European Patents) but I have a vested interest in this one, I’d like to see Sendmail make itself expensive, propriety and (even more) difficult to distribute. You may consider that an odd view but look at it from a different perspective, everyone who still (cough Redhat cough) packages it in the base system would have to join the rest of the twenty first century and bundles something that actually works, like Postfix or Exim.

Before I get hate mail from the people who have spent years of their lives in caves and on mountain tops learning the arcane syntax and pointlessly complex options let me state for the record, I understand that for certain near-unique and highly powered tasks you need Sendmail and nothing else will do. If you are in that area then you can damn well build your own version. For the rest of the people that get it by default it’s time to step in and give them a better baseline; anything that’s not Sendmail.