Smith Report + sendmail (revisited)

[Quentin Campbell]

On Sat, 1 Jul 2000, Richard Clayton wrote:

> In article <Pine.SOL.4.21.0006301620150.15539-100000@aidan.ncl.ac.uk>,
> Quentin Campbell <Q.G.Campbell@newcastle.ac.uk> writes
> 
> >I think I now understand why the Smith Report people picked out "sendmail"
> >for active filtering of mail. 
> 
> I think they'd heard of it. They are not complete ignoramuses !

If you are suggesting that they picked on "sendmail" simply because it has
been around for a long time and that "they'd heard of it" then you have
missed the point!

I have been working with sendmail for 20 years or so and it wasn't new
even when I started hacking sendmail.cf files. But until a year ago it
offered the authors of the Smith Report *nothing* by way of any special
intercept/filtering capability. The new facility only became available
with sendmail 8.10.0 in about March 1999.

Rather than suggesting that the Report's authors were "ignoramuses" I was
suggesting quite the opposite and said that they had a "knowing"
awareness. They clearly had access to consultants who were very familiar
with recent e-mail MTA developments and operation.

Perhaps this should not be a surprise to a lot of people.

> 
> >This may surprise a lot of people.
> 
> Indeed - since many of the larger ISPs seem to be running Exim instead
> 

Exim could be your test of whether the reports authors' were "ignoramuses"
or not, Richard, since you might be justfified in labeling them as such if
"Exim" offered an interception capability better than that now offered by
"sendmail".

As good as Exim might be in other regards it rather lags behind sendmail
in terms of the number of systems that run it as their MTA. Consider the
numbers - all Sun and H-P Unix boxes, for example, have provided a
compiled and configured sendmail as standard with the operating system.
Add to that Linux systems and you have some idea of just how widely
sendmail is used and distributed.


 
Quentin
--
PHONE: +44 191 222 8209     Computing Service, University of Newcastle
FAX:   +44 191 222 8765     Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom, NE1 7RU.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Any opinions expressed above are mine. The University can get its own."