# I see latest sendmail version is much old?



## HL1234 (May 4, 2019)

I see that the latest sendmail version is much old - more then 3 years.
And the website https://www.sendmail.org goes to https://www.proofpoint.com where you can find
https://www.proofpoint.com/us/open-source-email-solution and further old source form 2015 (!)

Is sendmail dead and develoment has stopped?

I'm using sendmail since a lot of years and have now to install it again. My intention here is not a diskussion about what is the best mail server, but
is it recommended now better to switch to an other mail transfer agent service, because sendmail is to old?

Thanks for give me an update.


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## trev (May 5, 2019)

The ftp.sendmail.org server has a snapshot of sendmail v8.16.0.41 from February 2019, so I do not think that sendmail development is dead just yet 

The current sendmail in  my FreeBSD-11.2 systems is v8.15.2 (the current version).


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## HL1234 (May 5, 2019)

thanks - I only look in the pub folder, sorry for my mistake


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## trev (May 6, 2019)

No worries, you scared me into checking myself


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## SirDice (May 7, 2019)

HL1234 said:


> I see that the latest sendmail version is much old - more then 3 years.


Is your FreeBSD version still supported? Because this sounds like you have an old FreeBSD version.


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## HL1234 (May 9, 2019)

No, I have installed a new system with  FreeBSD Release 12.0 compiled without sendmail. I like to install sendmail from the ports. Before doing that, I ckecked the website for any new changes and was wondering why it goes to https://www.proofpoint.com. 
Also in https://svnweb.freebsd.org/ports/head/mail/sendmail/pkg-descr?view=log I see "Modified _Wed Jan 22 15:44:51 *2014 *UTC_ (5 years, 3 months ago" so I asked me would it be wise using sendmail again?
Because of the anser form [trev] I will take it.


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## usdmatt (May 9, 2019)

pkg-descr is just a description of the port and doesn't always need updating. The distinfo file which lists the checksum of the software was updated 3 years ago, so that's the last time the upstream source code was updated, which still seems a long time ago; However, it references 8.15.2, which is still the latest stable release as far as I can see. The Makefile & patches were updated 7 days ago so it does look like it is getting patched regularly.

I don't really follow Sendmail so I'm not quite sure why there's been no official release for 3 years and it seems numerous changes have had to be made by adding patches instead. Regarding Proofpoint it seems they acquired Sendmail 6 years ago.

Personally I had to use Postfix about 4 years ago for a specific feature (restricting sender address based on sasl username) and never looked back. The only reason I ever use Sendmail these days is when I simply need to submit local email, in which case un-commenting and setting a single smarthost line in the mc file, then running `make install restart` beats installing a package.


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## SirDice (May 9, 2019)

You're looking at the last change of a specific file; pkg-descr. As the description of the application hasn't changed it's quite reasonable it's now several years old.


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## usdmatt (May 9, 2019)

> The ftp.sendmail.org server has a snapshot of sendmail v8.16.0.41 from February 2019, so I do not think that sendmail development is dead just yet



I could be completely wrong but I'm very dubious of this. The only activity I can really see at all on the ftp server is in the snapshots folder. However the README file, which hasn't been updated since 2014 suspiciously gives 8.16.0.21 as an example version, which is very near to the 8.16.0.41 version uploaded a few months ago. I wonder if the snapshot was automated and doesn't really reflect active development (although that would suggest we should still be seeing new snapshot timestamps unless someone stopped it in February)...


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