[geeks] smail

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Wednesday, August 21, 2002 at 12:41:22 (+0000), Kris Kirby wrote: ]
> Subject: [geeks] smail
>
> Was looking around at SMTP servers that run on UNIX machines and noticed
> that Exim says it's based on smail. Smail seems to also be another GPL
> project, which *really* makes me wonder since that's a reinvention of the
> wheel.
> 
> Greg, care to offer me a clue?

Here's the comment I wrote in reply to a similar question on freshmeat:

	Smail-3 definitely came after Sendmail.

	It was written as a sendmail replacement for normal people and
	as such has a much simpler configuration interface instead of the
	finite state machine that drives sendmail.  In fact the most
	recent versions should work out of the box with no
	post-compilation configuration necessary on most leaf node
	sites.

	The major version number of Smail is "3" because it came after
	Smail-2, a very simple UUCP mailer written a very long time ago
	by Chris Seiwald when he was at AT&T in order to do automatic
	UUCP routing using pathalias and the UUCP Map Project database.
	Smail-2 replaced an earlier Smail-1.  Smail-1 was probably
	written just about the same time, or maybe before, sendmail, but
	I'm not sure (sendmail is first copyright in 1983 and smail-2 is
	first dated 1985).

	Smail-3's authors liked the simplicity of Smail-2 and the idea
	was to write a mailer to replace Smail-2 and bring new gateway
	and Internet capability without sacrificing the simplicity.
	Other than that Smail-2 and Smail-3 are really linked only in
	name.

	Most other currently used SMTP-capable mailers, including
	zmailer, exim, qmail, postfix, and so on were written long after
	sendmail was first released and most were written to address the
	shortcomings of sendmail.  Exim was in fact modelled after
	Smail-3 and could in some senses be considered to be a full
	rewrite.

Oddly sendmail keeps being "upgraded" (in some sense of that word) and
re-released too.  I don't think it's ever overcome any of its own
most significant shortcomings though.  :-)

As for the GPL part, well Smail-3 appeared about the same time as the
GPL, and also RMS et al were looking for an "official" GNU mailer at the
time too.  However the copyright was never assigned to the FSF and RMS
became disillusioned with it.

FYI I was the last maintainer of Smail-2, and am still the current
maintainer of Smail-3.  Some folks only half jokingly suggest I should
also revive Smail-2 since it could still have a place in the world.  I'd
rather keep working on the Smail-3 code though -- Smail-2 was
interesting on the inside, but _very_ far from robust (even in the last
un-release 2.7 version I was working on at the time I switched to using
smail-3 everywhere).

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

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