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Sendmail 8.10.0 Released
Posted by
Hemos
on Wed Mar 08, 2000 08:01 AM
from the put-out-to-the-world dept.
from the put-out-to-the-world dept.
Eric Allman, who is one of the primary people behind Sendmail, wrote to let us know that Sendmail 8.10.0 was released. The code itself can be found at
sendmail.org or from
their FTP sever.
A complete list of changes in sendmail 8.10.0 is available
on sendmail.net.
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Sendmail 8.10.0 Released
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Re:Sendmail upgrade caused slower performance? (Score:3)
Mail (and mail) is usually fairly IO bound (it must commit messages to disk per RFC 82(1|2) before passing them on). Get good disk and you'll go faster.
That said, I've been told that sendmail can't do more than a couple messages a second by "experts". Fortunately, my machines which ran a typical 30,000 messages/hour with bursts to 50 or 60k per hour didn't know about these "experts."
Rob Kolstad wrote a paper for Usenix on tuning for lists a few years ago. If you're a member, you can find it. If not, join and find it.
8.10 pluses:
8.10 (and the commercial product that uses it) allows multiple queues. This means that you can have 6 queues (each on a separate spindle) running mail for you. This should fill a T1 quite handily.
A big sendmail advantage is that you can get consulting and support. A company I did work for had those guys make some recommendations and help them and they seemed to benefit a lot. I figure if email is a production service, then buying support for it is a Good Thing. If the authors of Sendmail provide that, then great, money well spent - give back to the people who gave it to you (and these clients pay Sun a LOT for 24x7 hardware support).
Much of the tuning that can be done applies to any mailer. Sendmail, by default, is fairly "nice" to the machine. You can tune it a thousand ways so that it runs on machines from a 12MHz Sun 3 with 8MB RAM to a 128 way SGI at peak performance. If you want to tune it to chug out 120,000 message per hour and destroy the bandwidth of a 10baseT network, that can be done with some experience. If you don't have it, you can hire that experience.
Will 8.10 make a huge difference? Well it's been out for what, 15 hours? Beta for a while, but this has diffs from Beta12, so I don't think we know yet.
RE: the qmail/postfix rants. Showing release notes of security fixes of Beta releases doesn't offer that there was a hole that was exploited. It shows that the code has been reviewed (in beta and alpha, largely) and that potential problems have been removed. I thought that's was beta was for.
Re:Sendmail ... (Score:3)
More people are running it in production environments than any other MTA.
In fact, most sites that run something else are *ALSO* running sendmail.
sendmail's bugs tend to get found very quickly, publicized immediately, and fixed very quickly.
Compare to, say, Exchange or Domino. Especially with the recent renewed attention to the old revelations [heise.de] that Lotus cripples their encryption to make it easier for the NSA to break messages.
Re:Sendmail Sucks (Score:3)
I can speak for qmail with a little larger number of users. I have qmail running for a small ISP with 3000+ accounts. The same machine is handling authentication, file serving, POP, etc.
The machine is bored and its a low-end PC. You could build it for $1500 today. We push 15000+ messages a day.
We switched from sendmail/qpopper to qmail. I got tired of administrating sendmail, not having real virtual email account support, watching qpopper slam my disk by copying the user's mail file everytime they popped, etc, etc. sendmail just has too much baggage and isn't elegantly designed in the first place.
qmail is built very modular, tiny programs to handle every stop of the MTA process. This makes it more secure, setuid'ing whenever it can, reducing the amount of code that ever sees root permissions. Also, it is very easy to extend. I have qmail-pop authenticating from a SQL database, just by replacing the the checkpassword program.
After using it, Maildir support is a must. In a Maildir, each message is a file. It sounds like a waste of inodes, and it is, but the performance benefits are incredible. Now when a user POPs, they don't have to lock their mailbox, and only touch the messages that they want. Before qmail, qpopper was causing my server (then running 1000 users) to write 4 GB/sec on my little 4 GB drive. In addition, my secondary mail server can deliver into the same mailboxes without locking, etc.
I will give you that qmail can be a pain to administer by hand since its configuration is kind of distributed, with .qmail files in user's homedirs, redirecting their mail, etc. But I built a management system on top of it. This is where qmail really sings for us. We can change damn near anything just by twiddling some files, no restart, rebuilding config files, etc.
And the best part, in my opinion, I have been using qmail for 1 year and I'm still using the same version. It does what it does and is rock solid stable and secure.
How's that for a testimonial?
Sendmail upgrade caused slower performance? (Score:3)
This may be mildly off-topic, but it's a genuine plea for help -- see if you can recognize the symptoms and propose a solution. I thank you in advance.
I'm in charge of a system which sends out approximately 50,000 emails a day to a list of subscribers.
We were running this on a dedicated box. When I built it, this Pentium 120 with 128 megs of RAM and IDE drives was a fairly happenin' machine. It was running Red Hat Linux 5.2 and sendmail 8.8. The system queues outgoing mail into one of about 40 queues, depending on destination domain. A cron job runs sendmail against each one of the queues (the relevant invocation is:
/usr/sbin/sendmail -OQueueDirectory=name of directory -OQueueLA=24 -OQueueSortOrder=host -OTimeout.connect=1m -OTimeout.helo=1m -q
).
We were getting peak throughput as high as 20,000 messages delivered per hour.
Due to the relaying holes in old versions of Sendmail, I wanted to upgrade to the then-current 8.9.3 Because of the Great C Library Change, the sendmail rpm available from redhat didn't want to work. So I upgraded the entire box to Red Hat 6.1.
(please redirect all comments about the evils of RedHat, the rpm format, or how I should have compiled it myself from a tarball to
Now, the same volume of mail takes 6 times longer than before the sendmail 8.8->8.9.3, RHL 5.2->6.1
upgrade. Moreover, it takes the same time on a VA Linux Full-On rack system, so hardware isn't an issue.
Does anyone have a theory? Will upgrading to 8.10 help/hurt/be neutral?
Again, thanks in advance
Commercial Sendmail scares me a bit (Score:3)
Basically it means we'll never see them improve sendmail management issues in the open source version in order to drive business to their commercial product.
In my capacity as as a manager, I understand the need for commercial support and do pay for that. But my goals to have everything open-sourced are circumvented by this product extension scheme.
(Disclaimer: I could be horribly misinformed and stuff like Sendmail switch *is* open sourced, but I've been poking around their sites and haven't seen it downloaded anywhere without paying.)
The best of the new sendmail ... (Score:3)
for those who don't know
It uses the cyrus SASL library, so if the client supports it, it can handle nearly any authentication method, from Kerberos to CRAM-MD5
There is even a patch (or allready included in sasl) so that OutlookExpress (which uses an VERY OLD SMTP LGOIN command) can use SMTP auth !
I'm still using one of betas for exact this functionality
regards,
Michael
Re:Sendmail Sucks (Score:3)
I agree. Even with the m4 macros, it's just plain stupidly designed.
Why doesn't someone rip out the configuration part of sendmail, and replace it with something apache-style? It can't be that difficult.
--
Virtuser table (Score:3)
1. Have support for a sendmail.cw file, so that it will accept mail for all the hostnames. Put the hostnames in that file
2. Add in support for virtusertable, which is similar to
I have the O'Reilly book, but I didn't actually need it; I found all the info I needed on www.sendmail.org. It took about 1/2 hour. In case you're wondering, I'm a college student who's been using Linux for about 2 years, not a 60-year-old UNIX guru.
Re:Can postfix and qmail handle multiple domains? (Score:3)
You might also be interested in their qmailadmin [inter7.com] addon which allows web-based management of domains, and sqwebmail [inter7.com] which adds a hotmail-esque web interface for checking & sending email.
qmail is different than Sendmail, considerably so. But once you understand how it works, I think it's design is far superior to that of Sendmail. It's much more unixy, IMNSHO. There is ample evidence [cr.yp.to] that qmail is considerably faster and less resource intensive than Sendmail, but what really made the difference for me was the security [cr.yp.to] focus of qmail.
As I said, qmail is different from Sendmail, but there is a lot of contributed documentation [qmail.org] available as well as commercial support [qmail.org]. The qmail community is large, capable and very motivated. They do have one problem though, they don't have a 4-inch-thick O'Reilly [oreilly.com] book dedicated to their MTA...
...hmmm, maybe there's a reason for that!
Comments from a Sendmail developer (Score:3)
Sendmail Switch isn't open source software, it's commercial software. It does many sophisticated management thingies besides configuring sendmail.
That being said, OS sendmail configuration got much easier since m4 configuration files came about. And while it's not an Apache-style configuration, etc., it's on the same level in terms of difficulty.
The OS sendmail developers work pretty much orthogonal to the commercial component developers. Feature sets of OS sendmail are driven by the OS community. They are aware of the inherent difficulty of configuring sendmail, and consider it to be quite a shortcoming of OS sendmail, independent of whether management components exist in a commercial software product.
You will probably see OS sendmail become easier to use somewhere down the line.
One final note, Sendmail Switch was built using open source technology. It's not apparent to people outside the company, but if you bought the product you'd see we use open source technology extensively in the product. The commercial component developers also believe in OS principles, which is why our products use open source technology where possible.
Sendmail Switch is commercial software. But buying it supports the company. Supporting the company supports the OS developers - giving a secure "home" and dedicated resources to OS sendmail development. Benchmarking, compatibility labs, food, and clothing are examples of such.
Hope that gives a small view from the inside.
Regards,
Charles
whats new in sendmail. link for the lazy (Score:3)
Sendmail Sucks (Score:3)
MHO also says that if you are looking at setting up a mail server, you should check out Postfix [postfix.org] by Wietse Venema, or qmail [qmail.org] first. I have been using postfix instead of sendmail for quite some time now, and have not had a single problem. Of course, I only have 600-1000 users, so my system is certainly not a true test of its capabilities.
Multiple Queue Support (Score:4)
Support multiple queue directories. To use multiple queues, supply a QueueDirectory option value ending with an asterisk. For example,
This could be great for my Solaris box with 50,000+ active SMTP connections, as we may be able to segregate the mail queue onto seperate partitions!
EraseMe
Sendmail.net (Score:4)
They have a series of articles [sendmail.net] such as Spam control in 8.10 [sendmail.net], Performance and usability in 8.10 [sendmail.net] and many more.
Noel
RootPrompt.org -- Nothing but Unix [rootprompt.org]