MJ Ray
That's a kind offer, but I think it's important that a project trying to promote free software for education actually uses free software itself as much as possible, especially for public things like mail serving that it's also very good at.
I've been told that this didn't come out at all as I intended it. Reading it a couple of hours later, it does sound a bit patronising. Sorry. It wasn't meant like that at all. I just wanted to remind people that it's good to use what we're promoting ("eat our own dog food" as they say), and qmail is neither free software nor OSI open source. I hope everyone can agree with that, at least when free software to do the job exists today. I probably should have stayed off-list for a bit longer after work today, so that I calmed down. I've just had another reminder about why free software has so many practical benefits. Called by a customer to find out why he couldn't add more users to his webserver, I found a calculation like: available space = free space - space allocated to users which means that space allocated to users that is used is counted twice. The disk is about half-allocated, but the system won't add more users, claiming that the disk is full. The software is claimed "open source" but isn't OSI open source or FSF free software. Each file has a notice warning you not to modify it without express permission and warnings of dire consequences. I can see the bug, but if I fix it and something else breaks, I'll have a lot of problems. Very very very frustrating. Sorry for letting that frustration come across to the list earlier. It was a bit too close to what I was doing and, hey, it's the end of term and all sorts of deadlines for college were today, too. Happy end of term, MJR