[Mimedefang] Gentoo Linux and Mimedefang

[Whit Blauvelt]

I've got mimedefang running happily on Gentoo now - but note all the help I
had to ask for a few days ago because sendmail's instructions with libmilter
don't mention the necessity of the -c flag when recompiling.

My sendmail though is not Gentoo's. My SpamAssassin and Razor are (Gentoo is
way behind in Razor versions though at present). The perl support libraries
required by mimedefang are Gentoo's except for the doctored one mimedefang
requires. My SA settings I did through the interactive Web page referenced
from the main SA site. My mimedefang script I've modified on the models from
the example site referenced off the older mimedefang site, and the FAQ
linked from the new one.

The problem I think you'll see in Gentooizing all this is that anyone who
doesn't need to extensively customize their sendmail install probably is
better off with exim or qmail or whatever - sendmail's power just is in its
custom fit. Gentoo has done a better job than other distros in packaging
apache and various other daemons sanely enough - apache in particular
benefiting from modular architecture and config files. But chosing features
for sendmail isn't just a matter of adding a module or a few lines in a
config file - it's often recompiling the whole dang thing, and even the
config files require a sort of compilation. We all know all this - sorry I
belabor the obvious. But Gentoo in particular was slow to even offer a
version of sendmail, and I think somehow you'd have to offer a whole second
sendmail ebuild to support mimedefang. I wonder if the project would embrace
such a forking of their sendmail effort, especially when there's a general
bias against sendmail at all?

That said, it would be great to get mimedefang more widely deployed. I've
got it outright refusing to accept anything scoring beyond 10, and putting
everything between 5 and 10 into a separate mailbox. A few things a day
might get a 7 or so that are legitimate mail, but I see no false positives
at ten or beyond at all - and that's more than half the mail coming towards
my server. Six months ago razor by itself was enough to keep sanity, but
anymore it's a shit storm out there.

Whit