[Mimedefang] Email Filtering Article

John Nemeth jnemeth at victoria.tc.ca
Wed Jun 15 22:41:00 EDT 2005


On Nov 2, 11:52am, Les Mikesell wrote:
} On Fri, 2005-06-10 at 23:00, John Nemeth wrote:
} > } >      There are third party patches available to fix this and other
} > } > problems.  The original author, Daniel J. Bernstein, is refusing to
} > } > accept them or to even make the necessary changes himself.  The quote
} > } > is still somewhat true in that out of the box, qmail is a rogue MTA
} > } > that doesn't behave in an acceptable manner.
} 
} >      djb has a pretty big ego and really doesn't care what others think
} > of him.
} > 
} > } anyone who isn't a skilled programmer is qualified to administer a qmail
} > } installation, what with all the patches necessary just to make it fully
} > } compliant.
} > 
} >      Your OS packaging system may have it all bundled up for you.
} 
} No, that's the other problem with qmail.  Apparently dbb does not
} believe anyone else is qualified to modify his code so the license
} prohibits distribution of modified versions.  A distribution could

     Hmm, not exactly open source...

} completely replace the smtp component, though.

     Things like the FreeBSD ports system and the NetBSD pkgsrc system
may be able to get around this.  The way they work is that you install
them on a system, then you cd to a directory and they 'make install'.
At that point an original tarball is downloaded from the master site
for the package, the tarball is checksummed, and packed.  Then the
sources are patched (either with patches that are downloaded and/or
included in ports/pkgsrc).  After this, configure is run if needed,
then make, make install, and finally it is registered as being
installed on the system.

     Notice that a pristine tarball is downloaded and then patched.
The question is whether this automated system would be considered
different then the user doing it by hand.

}-- End of excerpt from Les Mikesell



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