On Thu, 2003-09-04 at 04:58, Eric Sproul wrote: > On Thu, 2003-09-04 at 01:43, Rudi Starcevic wrote: > > Hi, > > > > Sorry to bother you all with this repeat question. > > I've have searched around and seen plenty of opinions but I'd like to > > ask again and get the latest from this list. > > > > Sendmail or Qmail ? That is my question. > > Rudi, > I work at an ISP that used to use Qmail, but now uses Sendmail. There > are several reasons why the switch was made, none having anything to do > with the "religion" surrounding either one. The following is my > opinion, illustrated with some examples from my company. > > First, scale is a consideration. Once we began to grow our customer > base, our email volume began to increase dramatically. Qmail queues > everything to disk, so the more mail you do, the more pressure you put > on your disk I/O. The server running Qmail was always blocking while it > tried to keep up with the disk writes. We had to decide whether to > spend huge $$$ on a big-iron server to handle it all, or to go cheap and > modular using some other MTA. We opted for the latter. We replaced our > single mailserver with four mail routing servers and two mail storage > servers, where customer accounts reside. >
qmail is more modular than any other MTA, especially Sendmail. > Sendmail uses RAM more heavily than Qmail, relieving some of the disk > I/O pressure, and improving performance under heavy loads. In order to > go modular, we needed a directory service to tie it all together (so > that each mail router can reference a system-wide config, and figure out > where the mailbox is). We chose OpenLDAP. At the time (1999), Qmail > did not have LDAP support (correct me if I'm wrong). Sendmail did. > Even if Qmail did have LDAP support then, Sendmail's source was *much* > easier to dig through for the performance tuning we did. > > Sendmail's milter plug-in system has also been invaluable when we > implemented server-side bayesian spam filtering, and as we work on virus > scanning. > qmail being modular has the capability of performing this also. > Today we are very happy with our Sendmail installation. Debian and > Sendmail play very happily together, and with our modular setup we > process over 4 million messages a day with over 60,000 mailboxes. Yes, > Sendmail has had several high-profile vulnerabilities, but with Debian > and apt, we were able to stay on top of it with little difficulty. I > can see how Qmail could look attractive to a smaller site with a less > complex setup, but for us, Sendmail was the way to go. > > Regards, > Eric Good to know you are happy. That makes a big difference. Dee -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
