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Comment by spapas82 | Hacker News Reader

It seems that almost everybody is using postfix these days... Is anybody actually using sendmail? Are actually any reasons for using it (beyond the expertise/preferences of administrators)?

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Sendmail works and is maintained, so of course it's still actually used.

That said, if you needed to get a message between two dissimilar messaging systems, then sendmail really shined. I don't mean "between gmail and outlook", I mean really different messaging systems. Like between SMTP and DECNet: no problems. UUCP connected MUA to a IBM CM/VMS PROFS user? We can make that work. AOL or Compuserv email address to Banyan Vines X.400? Why not. Now, it ranged from "this sucks" to "I will seek the peace of death once I figure this out" to actually get that stuff working reliably, but what you needed do it is in there.

This is something that was very common for an MTA to need to do 30-40+ years ago. That was about the last time sendmail had a use case where it was genuinely superior to other offerings.

Edit: VM/CMS, not CM/VMS.

> Is anybody actually using sendmail?

Not sure if this counts to you, but I believe FreeBSD still ships with functioning mail out of the box, and they use sendmail. On FreeBSD 12 at least, sudo actually reports incidents to root's mailbox :)

With that said, when I was engaged with the FreeBSD community years ago, there would be periodic bursts of drama over "debloating" the base install, and sendmail was one (of several) programs people wanted to remove in order to "debloat" the base install. So I wouldn't be surprised if the latest version no longer has functioning mail, let alone sendmail installed.

I believe FreeBSD 14 just changed the default from sendmail to dma:

https://www.freebsd.org/releases/14.0R/relnotes/

Thanks for pointing this out. In the release notes, I see

> sendmail(8) and its configuration remain available.

I assume this means sendmail still exists in base installs. Do you know the rationale behind this decision? Upgrading from FreeBSD 13 shouldn't result in the binary suddenly going away, so I want to believe there are no backwards compatibility concerns with simply replacing sendmail with dma.

IMO dma(8) says enough about rationale:

        dma  is not  intended  as  a  replacement  for real,  big  MTAs  like
       sendmail(8) or postfix(1).  Consequently, dma does not listen  on  port
       25 for incoming connections.

I believe they got their wish in 14...

From the release notes: The default mail transport agent (MTA) is now the Dragonfly Mail Agent (dma(8)) rather than sendmail(8). Configuration of the MTA is done via mailer.conf(5). sendmail(8) and its configuration remain available.

When I use `git send-email`, I believe it uses sendmail, doesn't it? Also when I installed OpenSMTPD, it overwrote sendmail. I believe `msmtp` also uses sendmail ("SMTP client with a sendmail compatible interface").

Or did I misunderstand the question? I thought sendmail was basically just an interface.

Yeah, you misunderstood the question; sendmail refers a specific piece of software and source of a lot of sysadmin trauma.

sendmail is both, a commandline client (interface, because it's implemented by multiple projects) that sends mail from the local machine, as well as a full-blown MTA (smtp server, as in postfix).

Proofpoint bought them in 2013, and I imagine that they use it in some fashion, so a significant volume of mail may well be handled by it daily.

I use sendmail on a couple of servers. Started them in the late 90s with FreeBSD and it was easier to just keep moving the sendmail configs as I upgraded the servers. What I have works and works well for what I'm doing, though I have an idea someday I'll move over to Postfix...

The other major open source email server is Exim, which is the default on Debian.

last time I've seen sendmail in production was at a job back in 2014

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