On Wednesday, March 6, I attended New York City BSD User Group and presented Maintaining qmail in 2019. This one pairs nicely with my recent DevOpsDays Ignite talk about why and how to Run Your @wn Email Server! That this particular “how” could be explained in 5 minutes is remarkable, if I may say so myself. In this NYCBUG talk — my first since 2014 — I show my work. It’s a real-world, open-source tale of methodically, incrementally reducing complexity in order to afford added functionality.

My abstract:

qmail 1.03 was notoriously bothersome to deploy. Twenty years later, for common use cases, I’ve finally made it pretty easy. If you want to try it out, I’ll help! (Don’t worry, it’s even easier to uninstall.) Or just listen as I share the sequence of stepwise improvements from then to now — including pkgsrc packaging, new code, and testing on lots of platforms — as well as the reasons I keep finding this project worthwhile.

• Slides

Here’s the video: