Early Warning Message

From: Seppo J Niemi (zaphod@bart.lpt.fi)
Date: Fri Jan 24 1997 - 22:05:46 EET


I finally got fed up with sendmail. First of all, it's too slow: when a
message is sent to rp-ml, it may take up to 8 or 10 hours before every
(reachable) recipient will receive it. This is not what I would call a
"rapid" mailing list...

And besides, there are new security bugs leaping from behind a corner
every now and then. Version 8.6.9 was thought to be bug-free, and now
we are running 8.8.5; version 8.8.4 had a bug that allowed _remote_
intruders to gain root-access.

So, I've decided to replace our mail transfer agent with a piece of
software called Exim. Exim is much simpler than sendmail, and
therefore considerably faster and more secure. I read the
documentation, glanced through the code - and I'm pretty sure that
it's a good choice.

Exim is designed to be a drop-in replacement for sendmail and there
shouldn't be any problems when switching to it. However, I've been
working with Unix systems long enough to know that problems always
arise, especially when they shouldn't.

So - Be Warned! I'll install Exim some time this weekend, probably on
Sunday.

//zaphod



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