25 years of Postfix

Posted Dec 18, 2023 11:05 UTC (Mon) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523)
In reply to: 25 years of Postfix by rsidd
Parent article: 25 years of Postfix

What is the history of exim ?

25 years of Postfix

Posted Dec 18, 2023 23:10 UTC (Mon) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (5 responses)

IIRC, exim appeared a little earlier than Postfix and qmail, as a “better Sendmail” with a less obtuse configuration mechanism.

The main reason exim (rather than Postfix) is the default MTA in Debian GNU/Linux is that when the project was looking for a Sendmail replacement, Postfix wasn't quite ready yet and exim looked like the best option at the time. In the meantime nobody has had the stomach to revisit that decision seriously, especially since exim – certainly as a minimally-configured default setup – is an absolutely reasonable MTA and on Debian, replacing it with Postfix is a fairly trivial exercise for people who are that way inclined.

25 years of Postfix

Posted Dec 19, 2023 7:48 UTC (Tue) by joib (subscriber, #8541) [Link] (1 responses)

I don't know about Debian specifically, but AFAIK most Linux distros these days don't install any MTA by default (which, yes, is a slightly different issue as to which package provides the default-mta virtual package). Which I guess makes sense considering how the email landscape has evolved over the past several decades. Or if you do install a MTA by default, install some simple minimal one like DMA. Which is what FreeBSD is doing nowadays https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/commit/?id=a67b925ff3e58b072...

25 years of Postfix

Posted Dec 19, 2023 10:01 UTC (Tue) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

Traditionally a Linux system would have to have some sort of MTA in order to, e.g., allow the likes of cron to send notifications to local users, even if the machine never received or sent anything from or to other machines. Back in the day, the notion of a “minimal MTA” didn't really exist, so Linux distributions would default to something like a minimally-configured Sendmail.

Presumably Debian could do what FreeBSD is doing, but in the grand scheme of things, exim works, it impacts the typical Debian system a lot less than it used to (relatively speaking), and it is very easy to replace with something else out of the wide selection of minimal and not-so-minimal MTAs that the distribution offers. It comes as no big surprise that nobody really wants to go through the hassle of changing the MTA default, because even in 2023 that would probably spark a huge religious dispute that creates a lot of heat and acrimony and helps nobody.

25 years of Postfix

Posted Dec 19, 2023 10:40 UTC (Tue) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]

> IIRC, exim appeared a little earlier than Postfix and qmail, as a “better Sendmail” with a less obtuse configuration mechanism.

Yes, exim is older than postfix and qmail, and friendlier than sendmail, but its security record is not vastly better. It comes from Cambridge University. I think our place uses it because it comes with Debian, and when they first set it up, postfix and qmail were too new. After that it's inertia. A quarter century of config settings that nobody wants to redo.

25 years of Postfix

Posted Dec 20, 2023 17:10 UTC (Wed) by ewx (subscriber, #103004) [Link]

Exim was inspired to some extent by Smail. A trivial example is some of the command-line options are inherited from it. I think the way the configuration is structured was also inspired by Smail.

25 years of Postfix

Posted Dec 21, 2023 0:49 UTC (Thu) by epg (guest, #34047) [Link]

Debian used smail before exim.