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Mail: Make The Dragonfly Mail Agent (dma) the default mta

by rfmoz on 11/8/22, 7:55 AM with 82 comments

• by jabl on 11/8/22, 9:32 AM

  I've been using dma for some Linux servers in a simple 'smart host only' configuration (that is, all mail is forwarded to some central 'real' MTA), mostly in order to deliver mails from cron. As the commit message notes, DMA is not a full-featured MTA like sendmail or postfix, but rather a minimalistic MTA. Makes sense to have as the default one; those who have a need for a 'real' MTA can install and setup such a thing.

• by linsomniac on 11/8/22, 8:59 AM

  This is your sendmail therapy thread. Relate how sendmail scarred you here. :-)

• by rfmoz on 11/8/22, 1:38 PM

  Maybe a coincidence, but Eric Allman is the developer of Sendmail [1] and the spouse of Marshall Kirk McKusick, one of the long-serving board members that left the FreeBSD Foundation this summer [2].

  [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Allman [2] - https://freebsdfoundation.org/blog/foundation-elects-new-off...

• by bell-cot on 11/8/22, 8:50 AM

  ...as the default MTA, in FreeBSD 14.0, which is scheduled to be released in July 2023.

  The currently-supported production versions are 12.3 and 13.1. Which are scheduled to be replaced by 12.4 (Dec'22) and 13.2 (Mar'23).

• by FrostKiwi on 11/8/22, 9:15 AM

  Really happy to see this cross-pollination in BSD land. Not just DragonFlyBSD getting packages via DeltaPorts, but FreeBSD also getting updates from DragonFly.

• by rasengan on 11/8/22, 9:15 AM

  I respect sendmail. Obviously there are other MTAs like djb’s Q mail, postfix as well as newer ones written in Go and Rust. Sure sendmail has had its share of vulnerabilities. But it’s the falls it suffered that made every other MTA strong.

  Let’s respect the software of the past. It’s the past’s software that built today’s software.

• by monotux on 11/8/22, 10:25 AM

  To be fair, dma has been in the base system for a long time.

  Now (well sometime in the future) I can remove half of my Ansible role for setting up dma on my systems, just skipping disabling sendmail.

  I learned about dma here, a great blog btw! https://jpmens.net/2020/03/05/simple-solution-for-outgoing-m...

• by josteink on 11/8/22, 8:52 AM

  I remember trying to setup sendmail 15-20 years ago, and it was a horrendous experience.

  Seeing this news reminds me of an old quote (which I cannot find a direct reference to at this point):

  "There is nothing in human experience when compared to setting up a sendmail config-file which can be considered hard."

  Based on this move, I guess this means sendmail haven't really improved much in that regard since, and most people just avoiding it for that reason? I guess... Good riddance, then?

• by ilyt on 11/8/22, 8:43 AM

  I'm more surprised they still used sendmail, most of the other distros moved away from that... abomination in every respect decades ago. I still remember fun of setting it up then migrating to qmail (which was also ...interesting to setup)

• by ysleepy on 11/8/22, 10:23 AM

  Finally. For, well, decades, the first thing I added to my rc.conf was sendmail_enable=NONE.

  I think local email is dumb in general though.

• by nix23 on 11/8/22, 10:15 AM

  Oh yes!! That is the right decision!! And maybe also change NTP to DNTPD or NTPsec..maybe?

• by deck4rd on 11/8/22, 10:19 PM

  I'm a fan of msmtp for this sort of "lightweight" mail sender, since I really only need it for cron notifications and a few hacky scripts. Maybe I'll give dma a spin.

• by ape4 on 11/8/22, 1:12 PM

  Are there Linux packages? I'd rather not compile from source since you don't get updates. Thx.

• by mnd999 on 11/8/22, 1:51 PM

  I’ve been doing this on my FreeBSD boxes for a while. Great move.

• by puyoxyz on 11/8/22, 9:24 AM

  End of an era

• by anthk on 11/8/22, 11:22 AM

  A good step in the right direction. FreeBSD has bad defaults, but I hope they can fix them one step at a time.

• by ruslan on 11/8/22, 10:20 AM

  Really bad news! Please keep sendmail default MTA!