[Mailman-Users] Extremely High Membership lists

[Paul Tomblin]

Quoting J C Lawrence (claw at cp.net):
> On Wed, 28 Jun 2000 16:23:37 -0700 
> Chuq Von Rospach <chuqui at plaidworks.com> wrote:
> 
> > It's very fashionable to bash sendmail, but sendmail was slogging
> > email around long before anyone else bothered to try. Wtihout
> > sendmail, it's really arguable that the internet would be what it
> > is today.
> 
> An excellent point.

Without the Model T, it's very unlikely the road network we have today
would have been built either, but that's not an argument for continuing to
drive Model Ts.

Sendmail is suffering very heavily from being old code, hacked together
when the net was smaller, quieter, and safer than it is today, and with a
lot of extra stuff hacked onto it since.  We're still seeing exploits
based on buffer overruns because the original code used fixed length
buffers, and nobody has gone through and ruthlessly rooted out every fixed
length buffer in the whole thing.  Yes, it's well tested, because it's
heavily pounded upon due to its popularity and ubiquitousness, but it's
still a creaky old framework with more and more kluges grafted onto it,
and hardly a week goes by without another exploit being found.

It's also dog slow compared to postfix, qmail or exim.

-- 
Paul Tomblin <ptomblin at xcski.com>, not speaking for anybody
"The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education."
                                            -- Albert Einstein.