first release of the project , which marked the beginning of the development of the mail server fork . Qmail was created by Daniel J. Bernstein in 1995 to provide a more secure and faster alternative to sendmail. The last release, qmail 1.03, was published in 1998, and since then, there have been no official updates, but the server remains an example of quality and secure software, thus continuing to be used to this day and has amassed numerous patches and enhancements. At one time, based on qmail 1.03 and the accumulated patches, a distribution called netqmail was formed, but it is currently abandoned and has not been updated since 2007.
Amitai Schleier, a contributor to the development of NetBSD and author of various for qmail, together with interested enthusiasts, founded a project , aimed at continuing the development of qmail as a coherent product rather than a set of patches. Like qmail, the new project is released as public domain (a complete waiver of copyright with the possibility for everyone to distribute and use the product without restrictions).
Notqmail also continues to adhere to qmail's core principles — architectural simplicity, stability, and minimal bugs. The developers of Notqmail approach changes with great caution, only adding functionality deemed necessary in modern realities while maintaining basic compatibility with qmail and offering releases that can be used to replace existing qmail installations. To ensure a proper level of stability and security, releases are planned to be issued very frequently, including only a small number of changes in each, allowing users to verify the proposed changes themselves. To ease the transition to new releases, a mechanism for reliable, simple, and regular updates is planned.
The original architecture of qmail will be preserved, and the core components will remain unchanged, which will, to some extent, maintain compatibility with previously released enhancements and patches for qmail 1.03. Additional features are planned to be implemented in the form of extensions, adding necessary programming interfaces to the core of qmail as needed. Of
To enable new features, settings for checking the SMTP recipient, authentication and encryption modes (AUTH and TLS), support for SPF, SRS, DKIM, DMARC, EAI, and SNI are marked.
In the first release of the project () compatibility issues with current releases of FreeBSD and macOS have been resolved, the option to use utmpx instead of utmp has been added, and compatibility issues with resolvers based on BIND 9 have been addressed. The installation in arbitrary directories has been simplified, installation without logging in as the root user has been enabled, and the ability to build without creating a separate qmail user has been added (it can run under any non-privileged user). UID/GID checks during execution have been added.
Version 1.08 includes plans to prepare packages for Debian (deb) and RHEL (rpm), as well as refactoring to replace outdated C constructs with C89 standard-compliant variants. Version 1.9 plans to add new software interfaces for extensions. Version 2.0 is expected to change the mail queue system settings, add a utility for queue recovery, and enhance the API to allow extensions for integration with LDAP.
Source: opennet.ru
