# Philosophical question:  Sendmail in base install?



## emcee (Jul 21, 2011)

Hey,

Why is Sendmail included in a FreeBSD base installation?  Average hosts handling mail routing seems to be uncommon.  Are the majority of FreeBSD installations in the wild handling mail?

I am not throwing stones, I am not saying it's a bad idea, I just want to understand.  Why sendmail and not say...  Perl or Unzip or Bash?

Apologies if this discussion has taken place many times before.


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## fonz (Jul 21, 2011)

emcee said:
			
		

> Hey,
> 
> Why is Sendmail included in a FreeBSD base installation?  Average hosts handling mail routing seems to be uncommon.  Are the majority of FreeBSD installations in the wild handling mail?


At least *local* mail, yes. Other base stuff "depends" on it, such as the cron(8) system.

Fonz

Edit: Note to add: local mail doesn't leave the machine, it is "sent" between users on the same machine.


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## phoenix (Jul 21, 2011)

"Histerical Raisons" aka Historical Reasons.  The original BSD included sendmail, and it was kept in FreeBSD through the years.

At least once a year someone pops up on the mailing lists demanding it be removed or replaced.  

If you really don't want it installed on your system, you can add *WITHOUT_SENDMAIL="yes"* to /etc/src.conf, recompile/reinstall the world, then run *make delete-old && make delete-old-libs* under /usr/src to remove it.


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## gordon@ (Jul 24, 2011)

Some sort of mail daemon is needed to deliver the mail that is generated by the server as part of its daily accounting. Sendmail has an extremely long history with *BSD and since we have very active maintainers for it, there hasn't been a desire or need to remove it from the base and replace it with something else.


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