LWN: Comments on "Announcing notqmail"

switch to postfix instead

HelloWorld — Thu, 29 Aug 2019 12:04:02 +0000

IOW, they don't really have an answer.

Announcing notqmail

schmonz — Tue, 27 Aug 2019 01:25:03 +0000

The aforementioned qmail-remote refactoring is slated for 1.9. When that ships, notqmail will support IPv6 for outbound connections by simply replacing ucspi-tcp with ucspi-tcp6 (which already gets you IPv6, today, for submission and incoming). And the same architectural improvement will put us very close to supporting STARTTLS for outbound connections.

Announcing notqmail

vadim — Sat, 24 Aug 2019 10:54:21 +0000

How is not handling IPv6 a feature?

Announcing notqmail

schmonz — Wed, 21 Aug 2019 23:38:12 +0000

I don't think any of the initial batch of notqmail developers are vpopmail users (so no, we haven't pinged Inter7). Would be great to have your involvement.

That's a whole lotta patches, and probably not all of them are mergeable as-is. Guessing some are more specific to your needs and some are useful to pretty much everyone who runs qmail? I'd suggest we start by picking one that's small, widely applicable, and on-theme for our next release (1.08). Hop on Freenode #qmail sometime, if you would, so we can figure out what makes sense as your first PR.

Announcing notqmail

jccleaver — Wed, 21 Aug 2019 22:36:48 +0000

Do you have a preferred mechanism for submitting things? Because of the nature of qmail installs it may be difficult and/or require a lot of explanation for various patchsets. I've had RPM's for qmail and and vpopmail for about a decade now, but a quick count shows 87 patches in there. Is there a better way than git pull requests for some of this?

Speaking of vpopmail, have you communicated at all with the Inter7 folks on this project?

Announcing notqmail

schmonz — Wed, 21 Aug 2019 22:24:42 +0000

Re: s/qmail, I've sometimes borrowed (and then usually refactored) some of his code, and have frequently collaborated with him on improving ucspi-tcp6, ucspi-ssl, etc. I'm still hoping he'll consider participating in notqmail development.

Announcing notqmail

schmonz — Wed, 21 Aug 2019 22:24:38 +0000

Making qmail easier to install and run has been a longtime interest of mine. Before notqmail, I focused my efforts on cross-platform packaging in pkgsrc (here's a 3-minute installation demo on CentOS 7). Now that we're developing notqmail, "Meeting all common needs with OS-provided packages" is an explicit project goal, and we've taken some important first steps toward this in 1.07.

Announcing notqmail

schmonz — Wed, 21 Aug 2019 22:24:27 +0000

IPv6 for incoming SMTP (port 25, qmail-smtpd) and submission (port 587, ofmipd) is extremely easily had: just replace ucspi-tcp's tcpserver with ucspi-tcp6's. For outbound SMTP, one possible option for notqmail is to refactor qmail-remote to use tcpclient for network communication. Then it could trivially be swapped out for ucspi-tcp6's tcpclient. We're glad to hear appreciation for what we're trying to do. Thank you!

switch to postfix instead

schmonz — Wed, 21 Aug 2019 22:24:11 +0000

Postfix is very good. We also really like qmail. (From the notqmail wiki)

Exim is the king

LightDot — Wed, 21 Aug 2019 19:47:02 +0000

Looking at the research methodology, out of a total number of 1,775,165 queried mail servers, 838,307 provided SMTP banners that identified them and only those were taken into account.

Understandable, but a default banner setting might significantly affect the position of a specific server in the final result of this research.

Cpanel might also be an additional reason for Exim's statistical success, combined with the default SMTP banner setting.

Plesk on the other hand, supports using Postfix or Qmail. Plesk's Qmail default is not to identify itself, while Postfix's default is the opposite.

Announcing notqmail

jccleaver — Wed, 21 Aug 2019 19:35:51 +0000

At this point, not accepting IPv6 traffic is probably a feature rather than a bug.

Qmail still has its uses, and it's still (by necessity) far more customizable than virtually any other compiled mail system. I'm glad a new community has formed around continued development and stabilization -- netqmail was a needed effort, but it had a design goal of only including critical or necessary patches, and so couldn't really move the code base or community ecosystem forwards.

There's a lot of old qmail/vpopmail code out there that people have written, and a place for the best of it to bubble up into a release will be nice.

Exim is the king

claude.bing — Wed, 21 Aug 2019 13:58:46 +0000

> Exim 4 is currently the default MTA on Debian GNU/Linux systems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exim

That would probably give it a boost.

Exim is the king

xose — Wed, 21 Aug 2019 13:45:41 +0000

s/Postfix/Exim

Mail (MX) Server Survey August 1st, 2019

Announcing notqmail

LightDot — Wed, 21 Aug 2019 11:49:47 +0000

For those interested in qmail, take a look at s/qmail too.

Anyway, Postfix has indeed taken the popularity throne. These days it seems that besides valid criticism, bashing qmail has also become a popular pastime. But on the other hand, qmail seems to be quite resilient to both.

There are quite a few qmail servers out there and a lot of them are more modern that some commenters here seem to realize.

It is unfortunate that using qmail is not easier under various distros, perhaps this is something that is worth working on.

switch to postfix instead

ale2018 — Wed, 21 Aug 2019 09:52:06 +0000

>Postfix is as secure as qmail [...] I have used both

I thought the easiest switch from Qmail was Courier-MTA, due to its ability to import.qmail files.

Announcing notqmail

Gladrim — Wed, 21 Aug 2019 09:10:12 +0000

Seriously? Why? It's 2019. It doesn't even support the modern Internet:

https://github.com/notqmail/notqmail/blob/08a0b794f3c12c7...

switch to postfix instead

higuita — Wed, 21 Aug 2019 09:03:13 +0000

I don't understand why people still trust qmail after all this years... i can understand existent setups, but new setups?!
Postfix is as secure as qmail, have lot more features out of the box, do not need patches with unknown security record, it's compatible with sendmail (usage and milters), it's very flexible and scales well ( can be used either as a small local mail service to a huge ISP setup) and have good config.

I have used both and while qmail was amazing in 1999/2000, in 2019, it's way too limited and require more work to build a working setup than a simple "apt-get install postfix".

Yes, i know it still works after all this years, but also postfix setups from 2000 still work fine today and sendmail setups from 1994 also still work fine... that doesn't mean they should be working still!

Announcing notqmail

rsidd — Wed, 21 Aug 2019 05:51:57 +0000

It's remarkable that qmail still has users over 20 years since the last update from its author, and over 10 years since the last "community" update (netqmail). I used it for a long time, before switching to postfix, but these days I use postfix only as an outgoing MTA on my desktop (relays mail from mutt to the local smtp server).