As an experiment, when I built my new “home” server (the one hosting my personal email and websites, including this one), I chose Sendmail for my MTA. I’d been using Postfix in the server’s last incarnation, but I was a little tired of what I thought were the oddities in configuring it, and it looked like Sendmail had a nice interface for in-line content filtering.

The experiment is now concluded. Between the three MTAs with which I have experience (Postfix, Sendmail, and Qmail), Postfix is still handily the best.

The arcane and abstruse configuration for Sendmail is worse than setting up Postfix, to be sure. However, what finally tipped the scales is the poor way that virtual domains are handled. I was trying to set up Mailman for a domain that I host, and I discovered that Mailman can only create new lists on the fly if you’re running Postfix. This is due, at least in part, to the fact that you can’t have an address in a virtual domain delivered directly to a program. This effectively means that I’d have to create a local address along with every virtual address used by Mailman. This pollutes the namespace for one of my local domains with accounts which don’t need to be in it and requires me to shell in to my server and update the aliases file every time I add a list.

As an added blow, I discovered several days ago that Postfix also has a nice mechanism for delegating policy enforcement built into it, with a couple of sample SPF and greylisting policy scripts that seem to work well. So much for Sendmail having an advantage because of libmilter.

In my ongoing tweaks of mail systems at work, I reenabled the SORBS spam blacklist for a day.

Whoops!

Apparently, their quixotic crusade to blacklist every IP address from which they’ve ever received spam and demand a $50 ransom to be delisted continues. As you might imagine, given the number of users on their systems, providers like GMail, Ameritech, and Yahoo! have spam come through their mail servers from time to time, which lands them on the blacklist. As you also might imagine, these providers apparently have little interest in paying a fine to get delisted, presumably because you’d have to be a little daft to use a blacklist that blocks mail from them.

We’ll see if SORBS ever figures this one out or if their spam list is doomed to irrelevance.

I don’t much care for Perl; I think that I must be the only system administrator on Earth who doesn’t. I see it as a Swiss Army Chainsaw; “there’s more than one way to do it” is not a feature when you (or deity forbid, someone else) have to read the code later and figure out what you were thinking when you wrote it. Or drinking when you wrote it.

Anyway, an alert fellow IMSA alumnus made me aware of a clever Perl implementation of a classic program.

I guess it does have some uses after all.