From: Tom Metro <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Fri, 03 Dec 2004 02:00:02 -0500
. . .
Postfix had all the features I was looking for right out of the box. It
installs easily on a generic Linux platform; is familiar for someone
used to Sendmail; has a fairly logical configuration language; but where
it is really like night and day compared to qmail is the documentation.
Postfix is professionally packaged and quite consistently documented.
It is true that Postfix has more verbose documentation, but on the other
hand, I've never found an outright omission in the qmail documentation.
Sometimes the bit I'm looking for takes a while to find, though; the
online doc is quite terse, so I may not notice it on a first reading.
And there's no tutorial information at all -- qmail assumes you know
what you're doing. But that's what "Life With qmail" and the FAQ are
all about (and I do use them too).
Also, important with any open source product, the Postfix community
is quick to help out. It is a very popular product with a high volume
mailing list, so the gurus tend to be curt and have a low tolerance
for discussing details or dealing with newbies that haven't read the
FAQs.
I spent several years on the qmail list when I was starting out, and the
qmail community is also like that, in all respects. The response time
on questions can be phenomenally short; I tried to answer questions when
I could, but unless the post came in while I was actually going through
the list, somebody else usually beat me to it.
I didn't spend much time checking out the qmail community, but if
what I hear is true, Postifix's author is a tad more agreeable than
Dan Bernstein.
Those who have spent any time on bugtraq will know that djb has an
extremely low tolerance for idiots. His posts are usually short, well
deserved, and fatal. (djb is a crypto guru by trade, BTW; he seems to
post to bugtraq more frequently these days.) And, from the qmail list,
I know that he and Wietse Venema (author of Postfix) do not get along,
and some of that antipathy has seeped into their respective development
teams, so it's hard to comment fairly on their relative "agreeableness."
However, I will say in Venema's favor that he has apologized personally
for security flaws in Postfix (though I can't seem to find these posts
now). On the other hand, djb hasn't ever had to apologize. Both
observations, I think, are characteristic.
Which allows me to end with a sig quote from the qmail list, courtesy
of Len Budney:
When a user's mail has been destroyed, do you explain to him that he
was in an extremely esoteric and rare situation? Reliability means
never having to say you're sorry.
-- Dan Bernstein, author of qmail
-- Bob Rogers
http://rgrjr.dyndns.org/
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