Re:Announcing Notqmail
by codetrotter on Tuesday August 20, 2019 @06:45PM
(#20752999)
From the page you linked:
> Did your installation stop sorting messages correctly on 9 Sep 2001 01:46:40 GMT? Find the fix to the 10-digit unix date rollover problem in the important updates section below.
Reading that I imagined someone running those patches on their mail server for two decades before suddenly realizing one day in 2019 that for the past 18 years their messages have been ordered incorrectly, ha ha.
It will be a lot of work, no question about that. Fortunately none of it will be about Maildir, as folks like you have long since ironed out all those issues (thanks!).
It's possible to package qmail in such a way that it's trivial to install and run, supporting many modern features by default. I've done it. Here's a demo: https://youtu.be/Vq6vu9T3vow
But that required a lot of decision-making and a lot of effort by the packager. With notqmail, we hope to make packaging much much easier.
Re:Announcing Notqmail
by nineteen999 on Wednesday August 21, 2019 @01:58PM
(#20759637)
I wish you the best of luck with the project, I hope you are able to achieve all your goals.
I wanted to like qmail, it was definitely an improvement over the complicated disaster that is Sendmail, however, it always seemed to require patches to get it to do things that Postfix could already do out of the box. In addition I didn't like the dependency on the inetd replacement thing (daemontools?). It just felt so un-ergonomic.
In addition, the Maildir mailbox format (while very cool in its own right) usually required third-party software to be patched manually, for example WU-IMAP.
A day or two before the September 11 attacks, the UNIX time_t value rolled over to 1 billion, and went from 9 digits long to 10 digits long. The moment this happened, a comparison function in the WU-IMAP maildir patches failed, and our IMAP server started sorting and displaying all our emails out of order.
After scratching our heads and poring over the source code for a couple of hours, a co-worker and I found the problem and submitted a patch to the maintainer.
Funnily enough, the imap-maildir page still references this event even today (it probably hasn't been updated in years):
http://www.davideous.com/imap-maildir/
Under the section "10-digit unix date rollover problem". But it drive home to me as a fairly young sysadmin at the time of the dangers (at least for the inexperienced) of using third-party patches just in order to enable a non-standard mailbox format (eg. Maildir).