tired of hearing about "self-hostable" software that mandates out-of-process database servers because everything is built to scale out to zillions of users but not down to 1

[megmac@social.treehouse.systems]

@atax1a it was all the rage in 1999 or whenever @brook and I first set it up lol

[atax1a@infosec.exchange]

@megmac

yeah ok that tracks, lol

@brook

[megmac@social.treehouse.systems]

@atax1a @brook that said part of why I drag my feet on replacing it is that I do really *like* its architecture. I understand how it works, or at least how to figure out the parts I don't understand already. Which is not something I can say for postfix at all. It may as well just be a big blobby ball of goo.

[atax1a@infosec.exchange]

@megmac

in our professional opinion postfix's internals are strictly worse than qmail's from a modularity standpoint

[atax1a@infosec.exchange]

@megmac also the cool thing about cvm is that the same interface works for various backend data sources because the abstractions aren't insane bullshit

[erincandescent@akko.erincandescent.net]

@atax1a @megmac I keep thinking about looking at qmail but these days (compared to postfix) it feels like an increasingly convoluted set of arcane incantations

While the other software that's supposed to sit around it has increasingly moved on in other directions

[atax1a@infosec.exchange]

@erincandescent @megmac i mean you're not entirely wrong, and so our real advice ends up being "unless you're absolutely bought into the .qmail-*default subaddressing infrastructure you can probably just get away with postfix"

[megmac@social.treehouse.systems]

@atax1a @erincandescent yeah I wouldn't use it if I were starting from scratch in spite of my fondness for the way it's architected and the way you manage filters. The world moved on and it got stuck and the biggest thing you get out of using it now is getting stuck with it.

[atax1a@infosec.exchange]

@megmac @erincandescent and ability to run ezmlm, which was why we switched off of postfix. but, again, we're a coyote

[lispi314@udongein.xyz]

@kouhai @atax1a @ireneista NNCP & cronjobs might be of use for this.

[atax1a@infosec.exchange]

@lispi314 @ireneista @kouhai our objection is specifically to the extra care and feeding out-of-process database servers require

[lispi314@udongein.xyz]

@atax1a @kouhai @ireneista Fair, though ultimately the backup problem remains anyway.

Some sort of controlled access is necessary for backups whether it uses SQLite, Postgres or loose files in a directory for storage.

[atax1a@infosec.exchange]

@lispi314 @kouhai @ireneista we dump a zfs snapshot of our filesystem to tape

[erincandescent@akko.erincandescent.net]

@atax1a @megmac for spinning up a mailing list these days i’d be tempted to use mlmmj which my friends tell me lives up to its name as much as any software that has to interact with email does.

though whatever mailing list tool i’d run ideally would shove archives into a public access anonymous imap server or similar

[lispi314@udongein.xyz]

@atax1a @ireneista @kouhai File/data-wise or as a ZFS datastructure/patch (the differential thing it does)? (The latter might be more space-efficient, but I'm not sure what guarantees it provides for stability & compatibility.)

[atax1a@infosec.exchange]

@erincandescent @megmac yeah mlmmj wasnt quite there when we switched over

[atax1a@infosec.exchange]

@lispi314 @ireneista @kouhai as a zfs send stream, which has solid guarantees for those

[erincandescent@akko.erincandescent.net]

@atax1a @megmac tbh one thing i will say i like about postfix is that in most obvious places where you might want to delegate things to an external database it has a fairly simple protocol over a unix socket to do so

e.g. socketmap for recipient lookups

[erincandescent@akko.erincandescent.net]

@atax1a @megmac i suspect that qmail could do similar things with simple shell scripts but a lot of my problems end up being socket-shaped instead of shell-script-shaped