Quote:
Originally Posted by crook
Hello Mr. Dan! How were you involved in qmail & how is qmail different from sendmail?
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Im certainly not "the man behind qmail", that would be Dan Bernstein. My involvement was mostly around documenting how to use it, which was done thru my contributions to the Linux HOWTO project. Qmail is much like sendmail, in that it is a MTA (mail transport agent) which performs the duties of an SMTP server, and includes a POP3 server as well. The way qmail is different than sendmail is in the security design. Sendmail was the original, and it wasnt initially designed with security in mind. It is one huge app that does all the work it needs, and for many years was one of the biggest security holes installed on an internet server. On the other hand, qmail was designed with security in mind from the start. It is created by way of several small apps/utils that do a small set of functions, and each app has little or no trust in the others. So at each step along the way there is redundant validation to protect from things like buffer overflows. All in all, qmail is a far more secure email server solution, but it also has problems. The problems are all around usability. It is not very easy to install, and due to the licensing, its hard for outsiders to add or improve the functionality. More details can be found at
http://www.qmail.org but I hope this gives you an answer that will get you started