Re: Sendmail vs. Postfix vs. ?

[Steven Pritchard <steve@silug.org>]

On Fri, Sep 03, 2004 at 03:18:42PM -0500, Nathaniel Reindl wrote:
> From now on, let's refer to Sendmail, postfix, and qmail as MTAs.
> That is, they're programs that only facilitate in the transit of mail
> across the network.  That's what MTAs do.

And that's supposed to be all that MTAs do.  Historically (in other
words "with sendmail"), a MDA (Mail Delivery Agent) handled writing
mail to a user's mailbox.  On most modern Linux systems, procmail is
the MDA of choice.  With postfix and qmail, the MDA is built-in.

Historically, a MUA (Mail User Agent) like mailx, elm, pine, mutt,
etc. accessed the user's mail spool directly, but these days a POP3 or
IMAP server usually takes care of that part, and the user's MUA just
connects to the POP3/IMAP service.

So, you actually need to pick two things:

  * MTA
  * POP3/IMAP server

Again, my suggestion for MTA would be postfix, especially if you
happen to run Fedora, since I can walk you through hooking in
amavisd-new and setting up some heavy-duty spam and virus filtering.

For POP3/IMAP server, Fedora ships with dovecot, so it would be the
simplest thing to configure.  Pre-Fedora, I was using courier-imap,
and I've submitted a courier-imap package to fedora.us, so one day it
might be nearly as simple to set up on Fedora as dovecot.

And, like I said before, I like to throw webmail on the top of all
that, and Fedora ships with squirrelmail.  Plus I've found that users
can handle the squirrelmail interface just fine, so it seems to be a
good choice...  (Note that squirrelmail is just another IMAP client.)

Steve
-- 
steve@silug.org           | Southern Illinois Linux Users Group
(618)398-7360             | See web site for meeting details.
Steven Pritchard          | http://www.silug.org/

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