The benefit that all these generalizations promise is to modularize management of email accounts as separate from host user accounts. Suppose you're in charge of a mail server with 2,000 users. It's not convenient, though. I've done such gigs, and too much of my time went to managing Unix accounts that needed to be restricted from almost all the usual privileges of Unix accounts. It's like buying a Big Mac and discarding the meat and cheese.
Security becomes much easier, and scalability blossoms.
Have it now With a bit of tuning, 8.10 gives you all these advantages. Restart the sendmail daemon with a copy of the new sendmail.cf. This kind of tuning can give you powerful control over such sendmail facilities as virtual hosting. Moving forward with LDAP LDAP use remains a bit intimidating, despite the clarity of the documentation that accompanies the sendmail 8.10 distribution. The technical concepts involved in connecting LDAP to sendmail are straightforward.