Announcing Notqmail
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Announcing Notqmail
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Re: Announcing Notqmail
#2I have to wonder how much work is going to be required to bring qmail up to a modern standard. There's no doubt that the author is an extremely intelligent programmer with a deep focus on security. In the intervening period Postfix has really gained in popularity, and is shipped pre-configured out of the box on some major Linux distributions.
It is the default MTA for Fedora/Redhat etc for some years now.
I wanted to like qmail, it was definitely an improvement over the complicated disaster that is Sendmail, however, it always seemed to require patches to get it to do things that Postfix could already do out of the box. In addition I didn't like the dependency on the inetd replacement thing (daemontools?). It just felt so un-ergonomic.
In addition, the Maildir mailbox format (while very cool in its own right) usually required third-party software to be patched manually, for example WU-IMAP.
A day or two before the September 11 attacks, the UNIX time_t value rolled over to 1 billion, and went from 9 digits long to 10 digits long. The moment this happened, a comparison function in the WU-IMAP maildir patches failed, and our IMAP server started sorting and displaying all our emails out of order.
After scratching our heads and poring over the source code for a couple of hours, a co-worker and I found the problem and submitted a patch to the maintainer.
Funnily enough, the imap-maildir page still references this event even today (it probably hasn't been updated in years):
http://www.davideous.com/imap-maildir/
Under the section "10-digit unix date rollover problem". But it drive home to me as a fairly young sysadmin at the time of the dangers (at least for the inexperienced) of using third-party patches just in order to enable a non-standard mailbox format (eg. Maildir).
Re: Announcing Notqmail
#3I have to wonder how much work is going to be required to bring qmail up to a modern standard. There's no doubt that the author is an extremely intelligent programmer with a deep focus on security. In the intervening period Postfix has really gained in popularity, and is shipped pre-configured out of the box on some major Linux distributions. It is the default MTA for Fedora/Redhat etc for some years now. I wanted to…
From the page you linked:
> Did your installation stop sorting messages correctly on 9 Sep 2001 01:46:40 GMT? Find the fix to the 10-digit unix date rollover problem in the important updates section below.
Reading that I imagined someone running those patches on their mail server for two decades before suddenly realizing one day in 2019 that for the past 18 years their messages have been ordered incorrectly, ha ha.
Re: Announcing Notqmail
#4I used qmail for about ten years. It was remarkably good from a sysadmin's perspective:
- the config system mostly used the name of a directory where lots of software would use a filename (qmail.ini => /var/qmail/conf), the name of a file where other software would use a variable name, and the contents of the file as the value of the variable. This is really, really easy to read and write without writing a parsing library.
- separate executables do separate jobs, with well-documented interfaces between them. Oh, and if a part didn't need root, it didn't run as root, and if a part didn't need to be the same user as another, it didn't share users. While it was easiest to replace something at the edge of the graph, it was entirely possible to replace middle jobs as well.
- qmail was the original design home of Maildir. I approve of various Maildir++ implementations (nesting folders is useful) and you could add support for them by replacing your delivery agent.
- qmail expected to be controlled by daemontools, a supervision system that has inspired/been blatantly copied and improved upon as runit, perp, s6, and nosh. (I have a suspicion that nosh is what most critics of systemd is really looking for.)
- fast.
- nearly bug-free.
What qmail gave up in exchange for all this: modern features and required antifeatures... which, it appears, notqmail is going to implement. Huzzah!
Re: Announcing Notqmail
#5Used qmail a lot and would use it again if modernised a bit.
Vpopmail was great, too for managing users, hope it'll still work.
Re: Announcing Notqmail
#6I haven't used Qmail since 1999 maybe, I don't miss it at all but its kinda nice that some people have modernized DJB's code.
Re: Announcing Notqmail
#7Why not Postfix? I trust Wietse V. and Viktor D. a great deal, and I trust their coding abilities at least as much as if not more than DJB's for anything that isn't a cryptographic algorithm.
FYI, "I’ve learned more C, reduced build-time complexity, ..." probably isn't confidence-inspiring. I work with C a great deal and have for a very long time, and I though I'm very comfortable with C, I treat it with fear and respect -- I have found far too many security vulnerabilities just from staring at C source code to do anything else. Now, I too have "learned more C" over the years, but I wouldn't write a sentence like that as part of justification for some project written in C -- I would fear that others would wonder if I don't just know enough C to be dangerous. Perhaps one should not write "I've learned more C" as part of anything other than justification for moving to Rust.
Re: Announcing Notqmail
#8Why not Postfix? I trust Wietse V. and Viktor D. a great deal, and I trust their coding abilities at least as much as if not more than DJB's for anything that isn't a cryptographic algorithm. FYI, "I’ve learned more C, reduced build-time complexity, ..." probably isn't confidence-inspiring. I work with C a great deal and have for a very long time, and I though I'm very comfortable with C, I treat it with fear and res…
Postfix cannot do what qmail can do. Specifically, users can create and destroy email addresses themselves with .qmail files. This is different and more powerful than Google's plus-addressing approach. There are many, many other features of qmail's implementation that Postfix cannot compete with.
Postfix is not alone in this; no other MTA/MDA can do what qmail can do.
Re: Announcing Notqmail
#9Why not Postfix? I trust Wietse V. and Viktor D. a great deal, and I trust their coding abilities at least as much as if not more than DJB's for anything that isn't a cryptographic algorithm. FYI, "I’ve learned more C, reduced build-time complexity, ..." probably isn't confidence-inspiring. I work with C a great deal and have for a very long time, and I though I'm very comfortable with C, I treat it with fear and res…
Hey dude! Been a little while. Hope you’re well.
If we were starting from scratch, I’d be first to say let’s pick something safer than C. But we’re starting from where DJB left off, so there’s not much left to decide about language. Our roadmap aims to provide mostly Unix-process extension points such that new code can be written in any language.
Postfix is great, and I certainly hold Viktor in high regard (haven’t met Wietse). It’s just that some of us really like qmail. :-)
Re: Announcing Notqmail
#10Why not Postfix? I trust Wietse V. and Viktor D. a great deal, and I trust their coding abilities at least as much as if not more than DJB's for anything that isn't a cryptographic algorithm. FYI, "I’ve learned more C, reduced build-time complexity, ..." probably isn't confidence-inspiring. I work with C a great deal and have for a very long time, and I though I'm very comfortable with C, I treat it with fear and res…
This reads a bit like if you posted that you were going to restore your Camaro Z28 with modern parts, and someone replied, "Why not a Corvette?"