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Announcing Notqmail

schmonz.com

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Re: Announcing Notqmail

#11

Post by pmoriarty »

stonogo wrote: post #8
cryptonector wrote: post #7

Why 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.

It would be really useful to have an exhaustive list of all these things that qmail can do that other MTA's can't.

Re: Announcing Notqmail

#12

Post by amaccuish »

stonogo wrote: post #8
cryptonector wrote: post #7

Why 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.

I've got a similar thing with my postfix setup though. My users can go to their account portal and apply for an alias, which when approved (to avoid taking of important names like postmaster etc.) is added to their otherMailboxes LDAP attribute. They can delete the alias themselves when they're done with it.

I'm tempted to start auto-allowing new aliases and just having a list of names that can't be used (postmaster, webmaster) etc, that some services use for domain ownership verification.

As an aside I do hope qmail offers similar limiting abilities. It wouldn't be great if a user could make themselves receive webmaster@domain.tld emails!

Re: Announcing Notqmail

#13

Post by sigil »

cryptonector wrote: post #7

Why 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 has had 9 CVEs in 20 years, a few of them quite bad. [0]

qmail has had 1 CVE in 20 years, a local DoS. [1]

I trust djb to write correct code more than almost any other human on the planet. That includes all the non-crypto code found in qmail, daemontools, dnscache, ucspi-tcp, etc. If you’ve read it, you know how almost supernaturally careful and minimal it is.

Your points about mere mortals writing C are well taken though!

[0] https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list.php?vendor_id=...

[1] https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list.php?vendor_id=...

Re: Announcing Notqmail

#14

Post by schmonz »

amaccuish wrote: post #12
stonogo wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've got a similar thing with my postfix setup though. My users can go to their account portal and apply for an alias, which when approved (to avoid taking of important names like postmaster etc.) is added to their otherMailboxes LDAP attribute. They can delete the alias themselves when they're done with it. I'm tempted to start auto-allowing new aliases and just having a list of names that can't be used (postmaster,…

They can’t, unless qmail has been configured to know they control mail for domain.tld. The admin configuration mechanism for this (control/virtualdomains) is simple and powerful.

Re: Announcing Notqmail

#15

Post by lwh »

We all killed SMTP when we pointed the morons with domains at gmail/apple/yahoo/o365, postfix was winning when it was ended- no reason to revisit it. All that matters for email is what Google/MS/Apple decide to dictate to us now.

Re: Announcing Notqmail

#16

Post by sneak »

dsr_ wrote: post #4

I 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 li…

> 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.

this djb-ism has seriously affected a lot of the ways i unix, to date. envdir is such a great idea.

Re: Announcing Notqmail

#17

Post by xvilka »

schmonz wrote: post #9
cryptonector wrote: post #7

Why 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 m…

Yes, Rust is a perfect fit for such a project.

Re: Announcing Notqmail

#19

Post by tptacek »

xvilka wrote: post #17
schmonz wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

Yes, Rust is a perfect fit for such a project.

Not that I disagree, but to inject some clarity: Python would be a perfect fit too. The major MTAs are written in C not because they need to be, but because C was the only serious option in the mid-late 1990s. Any modern language would work.

Re: Announcing Notqmail

#20

Post by linsomniac »

dsr_ wrote: post #4

I 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 li…

I liked a lot of things about qmail, but I found it annoying as a sysadmin, like in the 1.07 days, because you had to do all this patching. I eventually wrote a script that would take all the sources and patches that one needed to run a reasonable mail server, and turn them into an RPM that could be installed, because I couldn't just provide the patched, resulting RPMs.

There were a lot of great things about qmail. I really liked the envdir and how secure it was. But eventually I found the attitude behind it very tiring and switched to Postfix, which is a really great program.

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