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Of course I can, I can even compile it from source codes, which I sometimes do. :)

I use FreeBSD for decades and sendmail was my number one and the only choice of MTA all that time. Not only mine, but all others FreeBSD users I know too. I don't get why would something that works excellent should be changed to something that, well, is just a dummy ? I love sendmail. I think I can cook it quite well, and I don't get why I should change my habits. Not changing habits is one of the major reasons I use FreeBSD these days. Otherwise I would switch to Linux long time ago. Now FreeBSD made one more step towards its death.

If someone has prejudice against sendmail adding sendmail_enable="NONE" in rc.conf is easy.



Sendmail was developed in the early 80s to be bug-compatible with crappy bespoke email systems of the time, as well as long-dead protocols like decmail and whatnot. It made a lot of decisions in that context that were sensible at the time, but that have become a lot less sensible as the world and ecosystem has changed over the last 40 years.

Sendmail is not dead, but its glory days are over. 30 years ago the entire world was running on Sendmail, but this already started shifting 20 years ago, and today Sendmail operates a tiny minority of the world's email servers.

If you want to keep running Sendmail: great! Go for it! But it's just not a sensible default any more. The art of picking defaults is choosing something that will work for most people with a minimal surface for footguns. And Sendmail is clearly not it. I appreciate you don't want to "change your habits" – I usually don't want to either – but FreeBSD does not revolve around you.


There are many more people who dislike sendmail than people who like it. It's like several orders of magnitude. And it's objectively hard to configure securely. Sorry. If you want to keep using it, nothing is stopping you, but the rest of the world wants sensible defaults.


I cant even argue about that mentality of beein so against changes. It's for sending emails...gosh...have you said the same about the git change?

Btw if you just used sendmail..always..my condolences.


Git is so recent comparing to Sendmail. I began using Git for my projects just a couple of years ago. I was die-hard CVS user, switching to Git was a pain for me. Now with Git I've had to employ Linux best practice - update everything once a month or so, which often leads to compatibility problems that have to be resolved. This all eats quite a lot of time, unfortunately.


Yeah but freebsd was subversion for a long time, you cant tell me you liked it ;)

BTW Bitkeeper user here...well and git because i have to.




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