Alan wrote:
It is useless for any reasonable use of email - unless you only enjoy
talking to yourself. And it is particularly bizarre that this
99.lots % of people only need internal email for daemons etc so a long
time ago (Red Hat 5 or so I think) it was decided that since sendmail had
such a godawful security history that it would be a lot safer if our mail
daemon simply didn't listen to the outside world by default.
Yet, those same versions shipped named and ssh daemons that were just as
insecure (perhaps more so) and had no similar network restriction applied.
grunge work. Someone doesn't want your mail to work. Or they want to
make sendmail look difficult to configure.
Well it could all be a plot by terrorists to cripple the US economy, and
they might be hiding under your bed, but as in almost every case in the
real world its simply a rational decision whose shelf-life has expired.
For some unusual definition of rational, I suppose. Rational decisions
would apply to all similar network packages. There is clearly some
prejudice involved here.
There has been some very sensible discussion about shipping one of the
minimal mail daemons by default instead, and failing that since the
firewall tools cover port 25 control there is a good argument for
relaxing the mail daemon default paranoia a little.
I saw some of that discussion long ago and didn't think it was all that
sensible then either. From the perspective of having shipped a broken
config file file, the package you need to fix it in a separate
non-default RPM, no GUI tool, and not much documentation pretty much
forever, the argument that 'sendmail should be replaced because it is
complicated' is just self-fullfilling. Half a dozen examples of
sendmail.mc and a 'pick one' approach would cover the vast majority of
email needs and a simple GUI could allow adding your networks to
access.db without reading the bat book.
And now that mimedefang has been included in the extras repo, there is
the opportunity to supply a really nice system out of the box.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
