[aclug-L] Re: What's your favourite MTA

[Jonathan Hall <jonhall@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> I know others (Jon Hall - "Champion of Postfix" comes to mind) have 
> preferences for other
> MTAs. :)

Actually I still use sendmail on almost all of my systems.  And I like it a
lot.  I use postfix on one system in particular where I have some needs that
sendmail does not (efficiently/easily) meet.



> What I'd like to know is the specifics of MTA preference amongst the group
> members.  Do you have particular likes and dislikes regarding MTAs?  Have
> you run into instances where a specific MTA didn't (or couldn't) provide
> necessary functionality?  Have you switched MTAs for business or personal
> reasons (and why)?

The one thing sendmail didn't do well that I wanted was a combination of
Maildir storage and virtual mail accounts.  Both are things sendmail _can_
do (in recent versions anyway), but virtual mail accounts especially are a
bit tricky to set up.  Postfix was able to handle the task quite easily.

I still prefer sendmail more tha postfix for the simple reason that I'm more
comfortable with it.  Once I become more comfortable with postfix, that may
change.


> Entirely open source
> Documented, supported, and developed as a viable and stable solution
> Non-hardware specific
> Scalable

Entirely open source:  Sendmail and postfix, the two I have personal
experience with, both fit the bill.

Documented: sendmail probably wins.  Postfix's documentation I have found to
be rather lacking--most of the documentation comes in the form of mailing
list archives which can be cumbersome at times.

Supported: Tie

Developed as a viable and stable solution: tie

Non-hardware specific: tie

Scalable:  I suspect postfix wins over sendmail by a small margin.  But I
don't know.  For very very large scalability, you might look into qmail. 
Some of the largest email servers in the world use that.  Yahoo! Mail comes
to mind.  I remember reading of others, too.  I personally despise qmail,
though, perhaps largely because its author is a pompus idiot who thinks
qmail is the end-all-be-all of MTAs, and won't hear anything to suggest
otherwise.  Even if he's right, his attitude stinks.  I find that many of
his followers/qmail users have similar attitudes (but then we all use Linux
and feel that way about Linux, right... so who's perfect? :)

I also have limited experience with exim, but other than aiding in
configuration, I probably can't offer much of a comparison there.

And I'm beginning to use ssmtp, but unless you're planning on installing
your mail server on an embedded Linux system, you probably don't want to use
that. :)

-- Jonathan


--
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Reina de los Angeles de Porciuncula"- and can be abbreviated to 3.63% of its
size: "L.A."
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