Sendmail: The Vietnam of Berkeley Unix 65Date: Sun, 6 Feb 94 14:17:32 GMT
From: Robert Seastrom [email protected]
To: UNIX-HATERS
Subject: intelligent? friendly? no, I don’t think so...
Much to my chagrin, I’ve recently received requests from folks at my
site to make our mailer non-RFC821-compliant by making it pass 8-
bit mail. Apparently, the increasingly popular ISO/LATIN1 encod-
ing format is 8-bit (why? last I checked, the Roman alphabet only
had 26 characters) and messages encoded in it get hopelessly
munged when the 8th bit gets stripped off. I’m not arguing that strip-
ping the high bit is a good thing, just that it’s the standard, and that
we have standards for a reason, and that the ISO people shouldn’t
have had their heads so firmly implanted in their asses. But what do
you expect from the people who brought us OSI?
So I decided to upgrade to the latest version of Berzerkly Sendmail
(8.6.5) which reputedly does a very good job of not adhering to the
standard in question. It comes with an FAQ document. Isn’t it nice
that we have FAQs, so that increasingly incompetent Weenix Unies
can install and misconfigure increasingly complex software, and
sometimes even diagnose problems that once upon a time would
have required one to
One of the books it recommends for people to read if they want to
become Real Sendmail Wizards is:
Costales, Allman, and Rickert, Sendmail. O’Reilly &
Associates.Have you seen this book? It has more pages than War and Peace.
More pages than my TOPS-10 system calls manual. It will stop a pel-
let fired from a .177 air pistol at point-blank range before it pene-
trates even halfway into the book (.22 testing next weekend). It’s
probably necessary to go into this level of detail for some of the
knuckle-draggers who are out there running machines on the Internet
these days, which is even more scary. But I digress.
Then, below, in the actual “Questions” section, I see:
Q: Why does the Costales book have a bat on the cover?A: Do you want the real answer or the fun answer? The real
answer is that Bryan Costales was presented with a choice of