available software

usendmail: replacement for qmail sendmail


How to install usendmail


usendmail is a replacement for the sendmail program in the qmail package.

Nomenclatura:

Reasons to use usendmail instead of qsendmail:

Compared to sendmail qsendmail is:

Reason 1)

Sendmail parses addresses given on the command line in the same way it parses mail headers ("To:").
The qmail sendmail clone doesn't do this. This is a problem is you, for example, run a http server for your customers which use their own broken cgi scripts and expect to be allowed to do all kinds of wrong things, so usendmail behaves more like getroot.

Reason 2)

Qsendmail doesn't know about a number of sendmail commandline options. Usendmail knows more of them (and handles them through ignorance).

Reason 3)

Qmail-inject, the backend of qsendmail and usendmail, expects a few environment variables to be set, otherwise it defaults to use anonymous@host.name as the default header or envelope from address.

This is a problem is qsendmail is called by a cgi script without any of these environment variables set. "anonymous@host.name" is possibly not the address the system administrator want's to see in that case.

Usendmail works around that:

This is not a breach of privacy but the change of an unwanted default.

Recent changes

Many more changes may be found in the ChangeLog file in the source distribution. This list only includes user visible changes and changes done in reaction to user input: