From: lars@beagle-ears.com

On Sat, 31 Jan 2026 21:22:20 -0000 (UTC), Lawrence D’Oliveiro wrote:
>>> Maybe not what you want to hear, but perhaps this is a good time to give
>>> up on Sendmail, and switch to a more rationally-designed MTA.

On 01/02/2026 03:02, rbowman wrote:
>> My memory of sendmail is it filled one of the thicker O'Reilly books all
>> by itself.

On 2026-02-01, The Natural Philosopher  wrote:
> Indeed. And I owned it.
> In the end it got so complicated that I rewrote sendmail.cf from scratch.
> Got it down to about a page.
>
> All configuration went in half a dozen text files.
> That was before encryption and authentication, though.

Indeed, the cruft was in the retention of support for long obsolete
features such as UUCP mail and address source-routing.

And as sendmail.cf became entirely too unwieldy, they "solved" it
my adding a completely different "high-level" configuration language
in the form of M4 with option names that were similar to the ones
in sendmail itself, but spelled slightly differently.
I never got the hang of writing in sendmail.mc, preferring to hand
edit sendmail.cf, but only in areas where I needed to (which
were very rarely needed and confined to a single line at a time.

So when I needed to look more closely, I now had to explore the M4
and rebuild the CF file.

Postfix also has a lot of possible configuration, but it was
surprisingly easy to get a basic configuration up and running.

At this point, I would suggest that anyone still running sendmail
on a workstation take the tie to bring up postfix at a time when things
are working well, so that the challenge of learning postfix is not
layered on to of time-critical debugging when something fails.

--
Lars Poulsen - an old geek in Santa Barbara, California

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