About:
Smail is a Mail Transport Agent. Its job is to accept mail messages from sources on the local machine, or from remote hosts, and deliver those messages to the appropriate destinations, be they to remote hosts or to files or programs on the local machine. Smail is designed to be mostly compatible with sendmail but uses a much simpler configuration scheme.

Author:
Greg A. Woods [contact developer]

Rating:	reset 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
8.38/10.00 (2 votes)

Homepage:
http://www.weird.com/~woods/projects/smail.html
Tar/GZ:
ftp://ftp.planix.com/pub/Smail/
BSD Ports URL:
ftp://ftp.planix.com/pub/Smail/smail-pkgsrc.shar
Mirror site:
ftp://ftp.weird.com/pub/local/

Trove categories: [change]

[Development Status]		6 - Mature
[Environment]		No Input/Output (Daemon)
[Intended Audience]		End Users/Desktop, System Administrators
[License]		OSI Approved :: GNU General Public License (GPL)
[Operating System]		POSIX
[Programming Language]		C
[Topic]		Communications :: Email :: Mail Transport Agents, System :: Networking

Dependencies: [change]
No dependencies filed

 Branches

Branch	Version	Last release	License	URLs
Default	3.2.0.120	27-Aug-2004	GNU General Public License (GPL)

 Articles referencing this project

• Debian: New smail packages fix arbitrary code execution
  by Patrick Lenz , in Security
  Mon, May 9th 2005 07:10
  

 Comments

[»] Handy
by Jason Martin - Aug 8th 2002 11:48:49

Definetely handy when you want a sendmail-compatible (ie /usr/sbin/sendmail) MTA for a firewall type machine that should only be send-only, no daemon (although this supports receiving as well). An example is a firewall machine w/Arpwatch -- it requires /usr/sbin/sendmail to exist, but who wants to install all of sendmail just to send a status message? Well done.

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[»] Smail history
by Greg A. Woods - Jan 30th 2000 23:59:21

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 insted 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 modeled after Smail-3 and could in some senses be considered to be a full rewrite.

--
Greg A. Woods

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