The other day I was having a conversation with someone and they said "I believe Excel is possibly the greatest program ever invented." I thought about it and I really couldn't argue it. Are there other great programs? Absolutely! The Turbo Tax website might also take the prize, IMO. These programs take something that is actually very complex and simplify it to drag and drop, point and click. These programs make our life easier.

As I continued to think about other programs that possibly could compete, I realized something else. Qmail is the WORST program ever created. Qmail is an MTA (Mail Transport Agent) written by Daniel J. Bernstein. It was first released on January, 24, 1996. It's final and current release was June, 15, 1998. Daniel stopped working on Qmail 9 years ago. Qmail has a cult following that has attempted to patch the buggy, broken software.

According to Wikipedia, and various other sources, Daniel has offered a $500 "reward" to anyone who is able to prove Qmail is vulnerable. Georgi Guninski published his report in 2005 but Daniel has refused to pay saying these security holes do not meet his standards. Interesting…

Qmail sucks! Any software that hasn't had an official release since 1998 is deprecated. You can only patch for so long. The 3rd party patches will start to conflict and need to be included in the core. Qmail needs to be entirely rewritten. Qmail is based on the world's most popular MTA, Sendmail. Sendmail has many critics. Sendmail has many flaws. No one claims Sendmail is perfect by any means. Sendmail comes with any Linux distro and is easy to stop and start. It's easy to check the mail queue and just as easy to flush it. Sendmail works. The Qmail cult loves to say Qmail is better than Sendmail. That's like saying it's better to drown than be burned alive.

If you are looking for an MTA, chances are you are going to have to pay for it. Writing an Enterprise level MTA takes a lot of time and a lot research. Big companies spend millions of dollars and thousands of hours developing secure, scalable, MTAs, that work. www.zimbra.com happens to be my favorite Enterprise MTA. It has a customizable AJAX interface with all of the functionality of MS Exchange. For $50, a direct-push plugin can be purchased for Blackberry and Windows Mobile compatibility.

Some things are just better when you pay for them. I am currently moving all of my email to Zimbra. But when I need to send some basic form mail, I am using good ol' Sendmail.

service sendmail start