Import of DragonFly Mail Agent

[Daniel Kalchev]

On 24.02.14 13:47, Thomas Mueller wrote:
> I don't believe BSD users use base system of itself to send and receive email.  They use ports (FreeBSD) or equivalent in other BSDs.

One of the beauties of the BSD 'base system' is that upon installation 
you have an usable workstation/server environment that can be 
immediately used for most Internet-related tasks -- and this most 
certainly includes SMTP. Or NTP. Or... used to include DNS.

We can strip pieces of FreeBSD off and end up with an kernel. Or we 
could keep the system very much usable out of the box.

Indeed, the current integration of sendmail is far from optimal. In 
fact, BIND was better integrated but is now gone. NTP is also pretty 
well integrated -- it is nice to have ready access to such tools on 
*any* FreeBSD system.

If one needs to strip down FreeBSD, there are already plenty of tools to 
do it, including WITHOUT_SENDMAIL.

One of the many problems with removing functionality is very well 
illustrated by what happens now, when you upgrade an pre-10 system 
running nameserver: you end up without it and eventually without your 
nameserver database as well. Imagine, one day a user updates their 
10-stable to 11-stable only to find out mail is no more.

Currently, without any user configuration, sendmail is run in send-only 
mode. You need to explicitly request for it to not run at all. If there 
is suitable replacement that performs the tasks the send-only sendmail 
does, I see no problem to remove it. Or at least make it non-default for 
a release or two.

The only remaining issue to solve is "I just upgraded FreeBSD and now 
mail is not working". Perhaps by installing sendmail with pkg if it is 
requested in rc.conf?

Daniel