Sendmail: The Vietnam of Berkeley Unix 65 Date: Sun, 6 Feb 94 14:17:32 GMT From: Robert Seastrom rs@fiesta.intercon.com To: UNIX-HATERS Subject: intelligent? friendly? no, I don’t think so... Much to my chagrin, I’ve recently received requests from folks at my site to make our mailer non-RFC821-compliant by making it pass 8- bit mail. Apparently, the increasingly popular ISO/LATIN1 encod- ing format is 8-bit (why? last I checked, the Roman alphabet only had 26 characters) and messages encoded in it get hopelessly munged when the 8th bit gets stripped off. I’m not arguing that strip- ping the high bit is a good thing, just that it’s the standard, and that we have standards for a reason, and that the ISO people shouldn’t have had their heads so firmly implanted in their asses. But what do you expect from the people who brought us OSI? So I decided to upgrade to the latest version of Berzerkly Sendmail (8.6.5) which reputedly does a very good job of not adhering to the standard in question. It comes with an FAQ document. Isn’t it nice that we have FAQs, so that increasingly incompetent Weenix Unies can install and misconfigure increasingly complex software, and sometimes even diagnose problems that once upon a time would have required one to gasp read the source code! One of the books it recommends for people to read if they want to become Real Sendmail Wizards is: Costales, Allman, and Rickert, Sendmail. O’Reilly & Associates. Have you seen this book? It has more pages than War and Peace. More pages than my TOPS-10 system calls manual. It will stop a pel- let fired from a .177 air pistol at point-blank range before it pene- trates even halfway into the book (.22 testing next weekend). It’s probably necessary to go into this level of detail for some of the knuckle-draggers who are out there running machines on the Internet these days, which is even more scary. But I digress. Then, below, in the actual “Questions” section, I see: Q: Why does the Costales book have a bat on the cover? A: Do you want the real answer or the fun answer? The real answer is that Bryan Costales was presented with a choice of

66 Mail three pictures, and he picked the bat because it appealed to him the most. The fun answer is that, although sendmail has a reputation for being scary, like a bat, it is really a rather friendly and intelligent beast. Friendly and intelligent? Feh. I can come up with tons of better answers to that one. Especially because it’s so patently wrong. To wit: • The common North American brown bat’s diet is composed princi- pally of bugs. Sendmail is a software package which is composed principally of bugs. • Sendmail and bats both suck. • Sendmail maintainers and bats both tend to be nocturnal creatures, making “eep eep” noises which are incomprehensible to the average person. • Have you ever watched a bat fly? Have you ever watched Sendmail process a queue full of undelivered mail? QED. • Sendmail and bats both die quickly when kept in captivity. • Bat guano is a good source of potassium nitrate, a principal ingredi- ent in things that blow up in your face. Like Sendmail. • Both bats and sendmail are held in low esteem by the general public. • Bats require magical rituals involving crosses and garlic to get them to do what you want. Sendmail likewise requires mystical incanta- tions such as: R$+$*$=Y$~A$* $:$1$2$3?$4$5 Mark user portion. R$+$*!$+,$*?$+ $1$2!$3!$4?$5 is inferior to @ R$+$+,$*?$+ $1$2:$3?$4 Change src rte to % path R$+:$+ $1,$2 Change % to @ for immed. domain R$=X$-.UUCP!?$+ $@$1$2.UUCP!$3 Return UUCP R$=X$-!?$+ $@$1$2!$3 Return unqualified R$+$+?$+ $1$2$3 Remove '?' R$+.$+$=Y$+ $@$1.$2,$4 Change do user@domain