[seanhunter]

OMG all of the times I had to refer to that book count as amoung the worst times of my unix life. That is the Unix equivalent of a book of black magic that will forever curse your life once you dare to dip into it. Thank goodness I discovered qmail before too much damage was done.

[woleium]

Early in my career I came across an article that ended "If you want to make a lot of money as a consultant you could do a lot worse than rolling up your sleeves and getting a solid understanding of sendmail".

I'm so glad I was too busy to take that advice.

[dagw]

That makes me wonder how many Sendmail installs are still actually around and how much work there would be for a Sendmail guru in 2023.

[seanhunter]

I don't think there's many. A bunch of the very large sendmail installs that I know about went to qmail pretty much straight away and the ones that remained were mostly people where were concerned about the fact that djb hadn't been at all clear about the terms of the qmail license. When exim was released they pretty much all migrated. It wasn't that long after that when linux distros started shipping with postfix so you're talking an extreme minority of boxes (machines which haven't been upgraded for 20 years, probably don't run linux, probably don't run any very high-traffic mail installation).

The thing is the stuff that used to be total black magic on sendmail (address rewriting, setting routes up etc) is all pretty straightforward on any of those other mail systems, so I'm struggling to see why you would keep a sendmail install around. If someone called me in to help them with their sendmail, pretty much step 0 would be to uninstall sendmail, install a reasonable MTA and go from there.

[dagw]

Sendmail seems to be a weird state of limbo. On the one hand their homepage still lists Usenet as the place to go for support and questions. On the other hand their latest release is from June of the year.

I get the feeling that are maybe 5 huge sendmail users still out there somewhere that still pay for support contracts and that is just about enough to pay for someone to turn out regular updates. But beyond that they have reconciled themselves with the fact that they are never getting any new users.

[woleium]

Usenet never went anywhere. There's very little spam, no banner advertising, and a plethora of greybeards. You should try it :))

[dagw]

Usenet never went anywhere...You should try it :))

I virtually lived on Usenet between roughly 1996-2006 and hung around a bit for a couple more years after that. I can assure you that Usenet definitely went somewhere. Even by 2005 Usenet felt pretty deserted by everybody other than the warez scene.

I will concede however that I haven't logged onto an NNTP server for probably a decade, so perhaps Usenet has had a resurgence without anyone telling me.