qmail - my experiences with the competition

I don't know if this is an appropriate place to say this, but I'm
guess it's small enough a list to be so ...

I have an account on a system which is running qmail, and because of
some work I've been doing on it I've had to get quite involved with
some of qmail's features and with its interface to the rest of the
system.

My general impression is very mixed. The fancy delivery and aliasing
features allow every user to generate new email addresses (of the form
<username>-<something>) without sysadmin intervention and sort mail to
them and make virtual domains easy to set up. These are very useful,
but are clumsy to use (one file per address) and never seem to do
quite what you expect.

The whole system has a number of unexpected behaviours, including
mysteriously delivering messages to the postmaster without explaining
why (presumably some misconfiguration of the delivery stuff is
involved, but it's all rather opaque).

The bounce messages are rather on the chatty side and do not contain
all the information you would expect.

The sendmail command-line compatibility and RFC822 header parsing are
still very ropey. I couldn't get its /usr/lib/sendmail replacement to
accept a message with a route-addr in the To field, and it doesn't
yet strip comments and stuff from addresses passed as arguments.

I've reported the outright bugs to the sysadmin of the system who has
passed them onto the qmail developers, and we'll see how quickly they
get fixed.

Overall qmail has some very interesting ideas bug it is still buggy
and it has less respect for the Unix/sendmail standard interfaces than
I'd like.

Philip: if you want to get exim ahead in the world it would be great
if you could look at qmail's virtual domain and
user-controlled-email-addresses features: email processing experts
will find them very useful. (I'd suggest that having a single dotfile
for all the addresses owned by a user would be a better way to go.)

In summary: I'd like to see exim take over the world rather than
qmail, which is why I'm mailing here to suggest to Philip Hazel that
the lacking features will do him good rather than mailing the qmail
developers to tell them that their implementation quality is poor :-).

Ian.