first release of the project , within which the development of a fork of the mail server began . Qmail was created by Daniel J. Bernstein in 1995 to provide a more secure and faster replacement for sendmail. The last release of qmail 1.03 was published in 1998 and since then the official distribution has not been updated, but the server remains an example of high-quality and safe software, therefore it continues to be used to this day and has acquired numerous patches and add-ons. At one time, on the basis of qmail 1.03 and the accumulated patches, the netqmail distribution kit was formed, but now it is abandoned and has not been updated since 2007.
Amitai Schleier, NetBSD contributor and author of various to qmail, together with interested enthusiasts founded the project , aimed at continuing the development of qmail in the form of a complete product, rather than a set of patches. Like qmail, a new project as public domain (complete waiver of copyright with the ability to distribute and use the product by everyone and without restrictions).
Notqmail also continues to adhere to the general qmail principles of architectural simplicity, stability, and minimal bugs. The developers of notqmail are very careful about incorporating changes and adding only the functionality that is needed in today's realities, maintaining basic compatibility with qmail and offering releases that can be used to replace existing qmail installations. To maintain the proper level of stability and security, releases are planned to be released very often and include only a small number of changes in each, allowing users to test the proposed changes with their own hands. To simplify the transition to new releases, it is planned to prepare a mechanism for reliable, simple and regular installation of updates.
The original architecture of qmail will be retained and the core components will remain unchanged, which will maintain some degree of compatibility with previously released add-ons and patches for qmail 1.03. Additional features are planned to be implemented in the form of extensions, adding the necessary programming interfaces to the core qmail core as needed. From
to include new features, SMTP recipient verification tools, authentication and encryption modes (AUTH and TLS), support for SPF, SRS, DKIM, DMARC, EAI and SNI are noted.
In the first release of the project () resolved compatibility issues with current releases of FreeBSD and macOS, added the ability to use utmpx instead of utmp, resolved compatibility issues with BIND 9-based resolvers. creating a separate qmail user (can be run as an arbitrary non-privileged user). Added runtime UID/GID check.
In version 1.08, it is planned to prepare packages for Debian (deb) and RHEL (rpm), as well as refactoring to replace obsolete C constructs with variants that comply with the C89 standard. The 1.9 release is scheduled to add new APIs for extensions. In version 2.0, it is expected to change the settings of the mail queue system, add a utility for restoring queues, and bring the API to the ability to connect extensions for integration with LDAP.
Source: opennet.ru