It says coordinated distro release today, and I've received a notice earlier today but that does not include the CVE number. That's confusing / does not seem very coordinated to release 2 separate security update notices in a day.
That mentions 4.98.2-1+deb13u2, and its changelog has:
exim4 (4.98.2-1+deb13u2) trixie-security; urgency=high
* Backport fix for Use-After-Free in GnuTLS BDAT/CHUNKING code path.
This is Exim-Security-2026-05-01.1, fixed upstream in 4.99.3.
-- Andreas Metzler <[email protected]> Mon, 11 May 2026 19:14:46 +0200
I suspect the revulsion is that he did not write a full blog post, the time and effort was not consumed, instead there was an engine that did it for him. At which point interest drops significantly.
I too suffer from lack of interest in machine written posts. but the real sociological problem is because it is hard to tell the difference, disinterest turns into paranoia. And this hurts everyone.
However in this case, the article in question does not read like machine written, so perhaps the revulsion was just over the hyperbolic tone.
Yeah, that extremely purple paragraph about how the blog was documenting that liminal period where humans worked together with AI as partners was embarrassing.
>And? then keep it for yourself. Why do i have to read your ignorant comment?
On a site dedicated to commenting on articles? I think you have a misunderstanding of how HN works. People (hopefully) read the article and share uninformed^H informed opinions on the article.
That has always included critique of the way that the content is written.
In this case, very valid critique. I'm astounded you're somehow managing to read "A LOT" and not run into it regularly. At least we seem to be moving away from the absolutely awful "I'm a crazy frat bro" style of writing where it feels like half the action sentences should be appended with "because I'm crazy!" that was spreading far too far and wide (hopefully because it's hard to coax AI into that style.)
I'm sorry but what the f is that timeline? (Condensed to relevant notifications:)
2025-05-01 - Vulnerability submitted to [email protected]
2026-05-08 - Exim maintainers notified the Distros
2026-05-10 - Restricted Access is provided for Distros
2026-05-12 - Public release and Coordinated distro Release
4 (2 really) days for distros, and then nothing, zero, zilch, nada between "Coordinated distro Release" and "Public release"?
"I should retrain. Something with wood." is the appropriate German idiom for this, I guess.
Many years ago I used Exim because it was default for my distro of choice back then. But after a few emergency patchings caused by yet another RCE in Exim I learned that switching to Postfix massively improved my sleep quality.
There's a weird folk belief that Exim is a secure 2nd-generation MTA, but it's not; it's a 1st generation MTA, like Sendmail and Smail. The two "secure" 2nd generation MTAs are Postfix and qmail. You shouldn't use those either, really; there is no reason to run a memory-unsafe MTA, or, for that matter, an MTA that isn't backed by a real database.
I run postfix in a receive-only mode to power inbound email processing. I'm very very glad there's no database requirement. It just passes the processing of inbound emails to a filter over stdin, which can do whatever it wants with databases or whatever it needs.
The problem with qmail is, everybody use a fork. No body use the real thing.
The official release is not standard compliance. It does not support anything modern spam filter need. It don't get new updates or features. It have funny license.
You can use a fork... but I need to ask: which fork?
Another memory-safe option is Haraka, which I’ve been using for several years now. I recommend it but only for people who need extreme customizability. For everyone else, the customizability is a bit of a footgun, since you can easily end up with accidental open relays and other misconfigurations (as I learned the hard way).
Right, and that fork is the only version of qmail people still run, and the bug they found was extremely funny given Bernstein's original qmail design (it was, if I remember right, a popen(3) vulnerability --- something that never would have showed up in Bernstein's code, but that's what happens when code gets abandoned, it gets picked up by people who don't really understand it). But it's hard to charge that vulnerability against the original qmail design.
"works fine" and "has some compatibility problems" is a little bit of an oxymoron... I understand what you're trying to say, but that does mean it's essentially unusable, despite "working fine".
The finding method is almost as interesting as the bug itself. XBOW is an AI-based offensive security tool, and UAF bugs at library integration points are exactly the kind of thing that slips past human code review — reviewers focus on protocol logic, not on what happens to object lifetimes when a TLS session tears down mid-flight in an error path.
There's a pattern here worth noting: the riskiest attack surfaces in complex C software often aren't in the core logic but at integration boundaries — where one component (Exim) makes assumptions about object lifecycles managed by another (GnuTLS). Those boundaries require simultaneous deep familiarity with both codebases, which is cognitively expensive for humans but maps well to automated analysis.
This is also why "use a well-audited TLS library" doesn't fully transfer safety — you inherit the library's correctness guarantees only for the paths the library authors tested, not for how you call it under load or error conditions.
Exim is apparently the largest email server these days... it used to be postfix, but with most people using Gmail or 365, running your own email seems to be an afterthought. /shrug
https://lists.debian.org/debian-security-announce/2026/msg00...
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