RFC: Sendmail deprecation ?

[Bruce Evans]

On Wed, 13 Dec 2017, Don Lewis wrote:

> On 13 Dec, Mark Linimon wrote:
>> On Wed, Dec 13, 2017 at 07:21:02AM -0600, Mike Karels wrote:
>>> It seems to me that the option that is best-integrated, and which serves
>>> the needs of the greatest number of systems, is the sendmail in base.
>>
>> I will submit the following from one of my boards:
>>
>> # uname -a
>> FreeBSD orangepiplus2e 12.0-CURRENT FreeBSD 12.0-CURRENT #10 r326497M: Sun Dec  3 22:14:12 UTC 2017     linimon at burner12.lonesome.com:/usr/obj/usr/src/arm.armv7/sys/GENERIC  arm
>> # whereis sendmail
>> sendmail: /usr/sbin/sendmail /usr/share/man/man8/sendmail.8.gz /usr/ports/mail/sendmail
>>
>> i.e. we are installing sendmail, by default, on single-board systems
>> that may have less than or equal to 512M of RAM.
>>
>> I think this is silly.
>
> Not really silly.  This machine runs sendmail as one of its primary
> jobs:
> ...
> real memory  = 268435456 (256 MB)
> avail memory = 245055488 (233 MB)
>
> I used to run a corporate mail relay with sendmail on a Pentium machine
> with 128 MB of RAM.

512 MB is enormous.  128 MB is also large.  Sendmail just worked for light
use on a 486 with 16 MB.  An i386 with 8 MB was more challenging.  I only had
32 MB on a Pentium-1 machine.  32 MB still needed swapping, but I turned off
swapping when 64 MB RAM became affordable (and used).  The 32MB system ran
netscape will no obvious problem except that it needed swapping for not much
more than netscape.

Bruce