sendmail.net: SMTP and the Single Administrator

“System administration tends to be a lot more interesting if
you think of the programs you use in terms of the people you’ve
dated. Some are boring, some are wild, some are practical,
some are nuts. And one – the one – is all of those things, and
more: elegant, powerful, smart … with a vindictive streak a mile
wide….”

“Fast in all the right ways, loyal and willing to go to the ends
of the earth to get the job done, sendmail is just the type of SMTP
server you could bring home to Mom, the MTA you want to spend the
rest of your life with. But get it ticked off – cross any one of a
thousand almost invisible lines – and wham! You’re in the doghouse.
You may not know it at the time, but, man, you’re in the
doghouse.”

“Sendmail, and a lot of the features that have grown up around
it, is astonishingly intolerant of error or misconfiguration –
especially for such a key element of the Internet’s infrastructure.
From the way the software itself reports problems to such big-stick
punishments as the RBL and ORBS, you can stumble into trouble in a
hundred different ways and not even realize it until you’re
standing out on the sidewalk in your underwear and the software is
heaving your messages into /dev/null.”

Complete
Story