MTAs

[Brandon Adams <emidln@gmail.com>]

These are just some general thoughts and responses to the whole
Sendmail vs Postfix thread.

Sendmail is old and crufty. Despite its age and inelegance, it still
is very functional, and has a lot of features that other MTAs do not
have. It was once the preferred MTA of the Linux world, but it seems
that Postfix is moving in on this territory. Outside of using a third
party interface to configure sendmail, it is not something I would
wish upon my enemy. To my knowledge, it is the only MTA to support
UUCP. (An example of the features that Sendmail provides, but you
probably will never use.)

Postfix is a newer, more "advanced" (different design from Sendmail,
this design is newer and thus many consider it more advanced) MTA that
includes out of the box support for things like LDAP lookups, regex
checking, and spam filtering (various technologies). The configuration
file is well-commented, and documentation is readily available.
Postfix is under the a roughly GPL license.

Qmail is a newer than Sendmail, yet older than Postfix MTA that was
designed by Dan Bernstein. Say what you will about him, but he has not
updated his software in a long time. In addition, he does not allow
modifications to be redistributed with his software, except by using
patch files. There are several communities that exist that provide a
laundry list of patches to add to stock qmail. djb (the author (his
initials)) likes to do things his way, causing his programs to behave
poorly with the rest of the host operating system in many cases (this
is mainly a problem if you want to use addon software that is designed
for qmail).

With that said, I use Postfix. I found that it is easy to set up and
maintain, and works well across several operating systems that I use,
including Fedora, Slackware, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD. Fedora and FreeBSD
include special programs to allow you to switch between MTAs such as
Postfix and Sendmail now, which makes using Postfix eaiser than ever.
Postfix is speedy, although it is said that Sendmail can be configured
to be much faster. I'm quite sure this would take someone with far
more time, talent, and resources than I, and am quite happy with the
performance of Postfix with my admittedly small mail server.

My configuration is, for the record, Postfix running inside a FreeBSD
jail, using Courier for IMAP4 on 127.0.0.1 and IMAP4-SSL on other
interfaces. I run spamd (from the OpenBSD project with PF) and
amavisd-new + clamd + spamassassin (pretty similiar to Steve, where I
picked it up (Thanks, Steve!)) The end result is delivered to another
Postfix instance which is running in my user jail. I have squirrelmail
installed for some of my users (I use Kmail and Mail.app most of the
time (except for this gmail account).) along with a Zope-based webmail
that I'm working on myself. All of my software can be installed from
the FreeBSD ports tree and/or package system or the FreeBSD base
system. The software is available for Fedora systems from Steve's apt
repository (or it used to be), and he'd probably be more than happy to
give you directions on using it (or pointing you to some)).

-- 
Brandon Joseph Adams
Email: emidln@gmail.com
Tel: 1-217-744-9201

-
To unsubscribe, send email to majordomo@silug.org with
"unsubscribe silug-discuss" in the body.