I use Sendmail for SMTP because the current distribution of qmail is subtly broken for some reason on Jaguar. Can’t quite work out why and I need outgoing SMTP too much to sit down and play with it. Anyway, Sendmail requires that / not be group writeable. This is understandable as Sendmail is so riddled with security issues it really needs all the help it can get. Still, I don’t quite understand why Apple doesn’t change the default sendmail.cf to ignore the permissions at least. It’s a bit insecure, but who do they think is using Sendmail? Anybody running a big server will use a decent MTA. For that matter, why are they even shipping Sendmail? qmail is simpler to run, faster, better and more secure, especially if it’s being supported by the OS vendor. Postfix is also very good I hear. Exim’s pretty tight too. What on earth would make anyone choose Sendmail for a new OS? Especially a desktop one.

By the way, I mention this because they issued a software update this week and instead of removing the group writeable permission I accidentally removed group executable permission. Doh! I locked myself out of the machine and it wouldn’t even boot until I remembered about single user mode. Phew!