A few years ago, I would emphatically have agreed with you. Now, getting those patches to provide services that are now taken for granted with MTAs to play nice with each other is a serious undertaking. If Dan (or someone else) was actually maintaining the project and producing a coherent source, I might still agree with you. ;-)
What service do you have in mind. Dan hasn't maintained for decades or atleast published his qmail2 if he finished it. If it had been released with the license it has now it would probably be part of OpenBSD, now they are working on their own smtpd. If you check the cr.yp.to mailing list you will find atleast a couple of complete and modernising patches. Maybe search for "released" -- _______________________________________________________________________ 'Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface' (Doug McIlroy) _______________________________________________________________________