[CLUE-Tech] recommended mail transport

[Nate Duehr]

On Aug 9, 2004, at 2:38 PM, Angelo Bertolli wrote:

> Can anyone give recommendations and/or comparisons about sendmail, 
> exim, postfix, or any others you may think of?

Hi Angelo.

My thoughts on MTA's are very similar to most everyone else's so far...

Sendmail: Complete pain in the ass.  (How's that for blunt?)  Avoid if 
you haven't been using it for a decade or two and learned all the 
intricate little tricks slowly over time.  It'll drive you insane.  
Anyone who HAS been using it for that long will berate you and tell you 
you're nuts to say it's "not easy to use".  Heh.

Exim: I use this currently on my personal mail servers.  Easily 
integrated with various things like spam checking at SMTP-receive time, 
etc.  Resource hog, and not great at raw performance.  (I use exim 
version 4, older Debian flavors still have exim 3 in them.)  
Configuration files can feel a bit overwhelming to newbies, but are 
generally easy to configure.  Documentation is voluminous and difficult 
to wade through if your time is valuable.

Qmail: Screaming fast performance-wise, difficult to deal with all the 
patches to make it useful.  http://www.qmailrocks.org has some nice 
pointers on getting it running on various distros with a limited but 
very useful patchset and the guy who creates that "qmail distro" is 
actively developing it all the time.  Once you figure out how the 
patches go into the quilt, it's not too difficult to add more.  If you 
have limited hardware, qmail's a good way to make it feel like you have 
a big machine.  A Pentium III running qmail and your favorite POP and 
IMAP daemons will still be plenty of horsepower if you're not stuffing 
everything through Spamassassin.  Due to it being a mostly "roll your 
own from source" MTA, upgrades/updates are somewhat painful when/if you 
need to do them.

Postfix: Sendmail-like configuration files, but done *right*.  Fast, 
and fairly easy to integrate with other software like spam-checkers, 
etc... but documentation on advanced topics is scattered to the 
four-winds... finding the *right* document about what you're attempting 
to accomplish is key.  Google is your friend if you want to do advanced 
things with postfix, as the main website has made little headway on 
decent "easy" documentation for newbies. Speed-wise, it's very fast but 
maybe not as fast at everything as sendmail or qmail, but definitely 
"fast enough".

In general, postfix is the sweet-spot in MTA's right now.  It's 
relatively easy to configure without removing powerful abilities, it's 
fast enough for virtually any mail server, and it's packaged in almost 
every modern distro, and the package maintainers have done a nice sane 
job of picking default settings in most cases.  Similar to my comments 
about sendmail above and admins who've run it for years... if I didn't 
have many years of messing around with exim under my belt, I probably 
wouldn't pick it today as a starting point.  It's easy to like what 
you've always worked with!  ;-)

--
Nate Duehr, nate at natetech.com