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Q-MailQ-Mail is a modern replacement for Sendmail, written by Dan Bernstein, proven to be more secure and much faster. A number of large Internet sites use Q-Mail are , Hotmail’s outgoing mail (although Microsoft says it’s going to transition to W2K), USA.net’s outgoing email, Address.com, Rediffmail.com, Colonize.com, Yahoo! mail, Network Solutions, Verio, MessageLabs (searching 20M e-mails/week for Mailware), Listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu (a big listserv hub, using Q-Mail since 1996), Ohio State (biggest US University), Onelist.com (which has merged with e-groups, another big free mailing list service), Listbot, USWest.net (Western US ISP), RIPE, Telenordia, Gmx.de (German ISP), NetZero (free ISP), Critical Path (e-mail outsourcing service with 15 million mailboxes), PayPal/Confinity, Hypermart.net, Casema, Pair Networks, Topica, MyNet.com.tr, FSmail.net, and Vuurwerk.nl and list is increasing
Qmail is a secure, reliable, efficient, simple message transfer agent. It is designed for typical Internet-connected UNIX hosts. As of October 2001, Qmail is the second most common SMTP server on the Internet, and has by far the fastest growth of any SMTP server.
Secure Security isn't just a goal, but an absolute requirement. Mail delivery is critical for users; it cannot be turned off, so it must be completely secure. (This is why I started writing Qmail: I was sick of the security holes in Sendmail and other MTAs.)
Reliable Qmail's straight-paper-path philosophy guarantees that a message, once accepted into the system, will never be lost. Qmail also optionally supports Maildir, a new, super-reliable user mailbox format. Maildirs, unlike mbox files and mh folders, won't be corrupted if the system crashes during delivery. Even better, not only can a user safely read his mail over NFS, but any number of NFS clients can deliver mail to him at the same time.
Efficient On a Pentium under BSD/OS, Qmail can easily sustain 200000 local messages per day---that's separate messages injected and delivered to mailboxes in a real test! Although remote deliveries are inherently limited by the slowness of DNS and SMTP, Qmail overlaps 20 simultaneous deliveries by default, so it zooms quickly through mailing lists. (This is why I finished Qmail: I had to get a big mailing list set up.)
Simple Qmail is vastly smaller than any other Internet MTA. Some reasons why: (1) Other MTAs have separate forwarding, aliasing, and mailing list mechanisms. Qmail has one simple forwarding mechanism that lets users handle their own mailing lists. (2) Other MTAs offer a spectrum of delivery modes, from fast+unsafe to slow+queued. Qmail-send is instantly triggered by new items in the queue, so the Qmail system has just one delivery mode: fast+queued. (3) Other MTAs include, in effect, a specialized version of Inetd that watches the load average. Qmail’s design inherently limits the machine load, so qmail-smtpd can safely run from your system's Inetd.
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