Re: Refreshing qmail server

On Thu, 29 Nov 2018 at 00:06, Kai Peter <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> On 2018-11-25 19:32, Oliver Welter wrote:
> > Hi All,
> >
> > Finally - some time there was an announcement that s/qmail and eQmail
> > want to join forces - are there any news on this?
>
> Now, I was hoping that Erwin replies to this question - anyway.
>
> To be honest I couldn't say that aQmail will come out soon. To be more
> honest I think it doesn't make sense to wait for it. May be it will or
> it will not come out.
>
> IMHO there are the following alternatives:
>
> - eQmail 1.08.1 to 1.10
> - indimail
> - s/qmail
>
> The order is alphabetical. Whatever you like and prefer. I couldn't say
> a lot about s/qmail or inidmail. If they would fit my needs, I never
> would have created eQmail. eQmail works perfect to me. But Erwin and
> Manvendra would say the same ;-)
>
Exactly. Ultimately it will be the end-user who needs to decide what
he/she is comfortable with. But one need to get hands dirty to figure
that out.

But It looks like there is just a tiny crowd left, who are still
working with qmail/netqmail to add new features required in the
current times.  Erwin, Kai Peter,  Amitai Schleier, Thibault Richards
and myself. As far as indimail is concerned, it is a hobby for me. I
keep on working on it because I love the way DJB coded qmail,
ucsp-tcp, daemontools and all of his other works. Coding in djb style
is lot of hard work, but fun. Even simple things like formatting
strings is about carefully crafting together the fmt_str, fmt_ulong,
etc instead of just one statement sprintf. You might have to put in
few substdio_put statements instead of just one printf from the
standard c library. But with substdio you know that your data has got
out successfully (unlike printf). Maybe it is just me, but sprintf,
printf are ugly. Arbitrary string lengths are ugly. I have seen
Erwin's code and his code is also with lot of care like djb without
arbitrary string lengths or variable sizes. s/qmail and eQmail are
much smaller and simpler to install and maintain than indimail, while
indimail has almost everything that I need to run and cater to large
number of users, but it has far too many control files and environment
variables to configure. qmailrocks has good documentation that any
newbie can follow and set it up. Mostly you won't go wrong if you have
simple needs and go with s/qmail, eQmail, qmailrocks or indimail-mta
(a much smaller version of indimail).