This is your sendmail therapy thread. Relate how sendmail scarred you here. :-)
Maybe a coincidence, but Eric Allman is the developer of Sendmail [1] and the spouse of Marshall Kirk McKusick, one of the long-serving board members that left the FreeBSD Foundation this summer [2].
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Allman [2] - https://freebsdfoundation.org/blog/foundation-elects-new-off...
...as the default MTA, in FreeBSD 14.0, which is scheduled to be released in July 2023.
The currently-supported production versions are 12.3 and 13.1. Which are scheduled to be replaced by 12.4 (Dec'22) and 13.2 (Mar'23).
Really happy to see this cross-pollination in BSD land. Not just DragonFlyBSD getting packages via DeltaPorts, but FreeBSD also getting updates from DragonFly.
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.
To be fair, dma has been in the base system for a long time.
Now (well sometime in the future) I can remove half of my Ansible role for setting up dma on my systems, just skipping disabling sendmail.
I learned about dma here, a great blog btw! https://jpmens.net/2020/03/05/simple-solution-for-outgoing-m...
I remember trying to setup sendmail 15-20 years ago, and it was a horrendous experience.
Seeing this news reminds me of an old quote (which I cannot find a direct reference to at this point):
"There is nothing in human experience when compared to setting up a sendmail config-file which can be considered hard."
Based on this move, I guess this means sendmail haven't really improved much in that regard since, and most people just avoiding it for that reason? I guess... Good riddance, then?
I'm more surprised they still used sendmail, most of the other distros moved away from that... abomination in every respect decades ago. I still remember fun of setting it up then migrating to qmail (which was also ...interesting to setup)
Finally. For, well, decades, the first thing I added to my rc.conf was sendmail_enable=NONE.
I think local email is dumb in general though.
Oh yes!! That is the right decision!! And maybe also change NTP to DNTPD or NTPsec..maybe?
I'm a fan of msmtp for this sort of "lightweight" mail sender, since I really only need it for cron notifications and a few hacky scripts. Maybe I'll give dma a spin.
Are there Linux packages? I'd rather not compile from source since you don't get updates. Thx.
I’ve been doing this on my FreeBSD boxes for a while. Great move.
End of an era
A good step in the right direction. FreeBSD has bad defaults, but I hope they can fix them one step at a time.
Really bad news! Please keep sendmail default MTA!
I've been using dma for some Linux servers in a simple 'smart host only' configuration (that is, all mail is forwarded to some central 'real' MTA), mostly in order to deliver mails from cron. As the commit message notes, DMA is not a full-featured MTA like sendmail or postfix, but rather a minimalistic MTA. Makes sense to have as the default one; those who have a need for a 'real' MTA can install and setup such a thing.