Re: Sendmail + some stuff I just have to say ...;-)

[Kalum / Grendel <kalum lintux cx>]

On  Thu, 8 Mar 2001, Anurag Jalan commented thusly,

> I have followed your suggestion ... Postfix works great ..
> fully configured in 10 minutes , and more importantly
> I *knew* what I was doing ....

Excellent, yes you made a good choice, postfix is written by Wietse
Venema, a guy with a proven security record who wrote the tcpwrappers
code that we all trust, and postfix therefore combines a high level of
security with ease of configurability as you have found out, also its very
very fast.

The point is that there are other better effective MTA's which make
sendmail obsolete, and therefore we should use them which leaves us with
more time to learn other things we like, rather than installing relics
from the past like sendmail and then reading huge tomes about how to
configure sendmail etc :(

A summary about which MTA to choose would be

1. Heavy site, experienced admin with some background knowledge of unix,
then qmail is the best as it is undoubtably the fastest in terms of
delivery and sites with very heavy loads will benefit from it, for example
that hotmail.com, egroups etc  runs qmail on solaris boxes. The downside
is that qmails configuration is a bit weird for the newbie, thats why I
suggested it for a moderately experienced user. 

2. New user to unix, wants a MTA which he can install and configure easily
and experiment with which is also secure, then postfix is the best. The
possibly only problem with postfix is that it is thought to be slightly
slower than qmail but apart from that it together with qmail should be THE
choices as MTA's for sysadmins.

3. About sendmail well dont even recommend it to your dog, true once it
was the king with more than 70% of the internet mail servers running it,
but now it is dropping drastically and sendmail.inc is getting alarmed and
bribing sysadmins to use it, and also bribing linux/unix distributors to
include it as there default MTA in their linux/unix distribution (Havent
you wondered why so many linux/unix distributions include a crappy MTA
like sendmail in it as the default MTA ?) :( Also make sure you have a
machine with plenty of CPU power and memory, if you plan on running
sendmail:(

4. There is another MTA called Exim, it is very easy to configure like
postfix but it has a rotten security record so no one should consider this
as a option IMHO.

Best Wishes,
Grendel


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