I am not sure what the policy is on cross posting so I have just replied to euglug.
I have used postfix almost exclusively as my MTAs since about 1999 when I as casting about for anything but sendmail. It takes a bit of configuration to get it working with Amavis but after you have that working SPAM Assassin and ClamAV are very easy add ons. I haven't used exim so I can't compare it. -How well do they do spam filtering in practice? I assume they operate in a fashion similar to Sendmail milters. Does the quality of the available filtering mechanisms compare to that of Sendmails? The spam filtering is the real resource hog. I heavily use RBL to kill as much spam as possible because of this. Postfix makes it easy to do this, but I don't recall that there is anyway to cache the results from the RBL lookup and pass that information on to spam assassin. So you either won't use RBL information for spam assassin or you will be making multiple lookups. -How "heavy" are they? Sendmail can process huge volumes of mail on surprisingly low-powered hardware, even while doing a fair amount of mail-munging. If you are doing spam and virus checking your MTA will not be the limiting factor. -What's the maintenance experience like, say 6 months or a year after installation? I don't want something I have to constantly poke. I already have an Exchange box for that.... After configuration it chugs away. As a matter of policy you should update your RBL lists periodically and update the spam assassin and clamav as needed. But you can automate the rule updates and virus definition updates. On another note, if want all of this functionality and want some support with it I would recommend checking out the Spam Firewall by Barracuda Networks; in my opinion the UI is work the cost alone. If you need configuration examples email me offlist. Good luck, BMG From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Quentin Hartman Sent: Wednesday, July 18, 2007 10:33 AM To: Eugene Unix and Gnu/Linux User Group; Mid-Willamette Valley Linux Users Group; General Linux/UNIX discussion and help, civil and on-topic; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [Eug-lug] MTA thoughts? It's getting to be time to setup a mail gateway at the edge of my network to sanitize stuff before it hits the company Exchange box. Originally I had planned on setting it up using Sendmail, but I have had some recent exposure to both Postfix and Exim, and they seem to be nice pieces of software and are generally well respected online. The most attractive thing about them is that they seem to "do the right thing" for the most, but maintain a fairly good level of flexibility, without the configuration voodoo required by Sendmail. As much as I like Sendmail's power, escaping from those arcane texts is appealing. I did some looking about for comparisons among Sendmail, Postfix, and Exim and the newest one I came upon was from 2003. I doubt very much that conversation reflects the world as it is now. For any of you who have used Postfix or Exim (or ideally both of those and Sendmail) in a production or production-like environment I ask: -How well do they do spam filtering in practice? I assume they operate in a fashion similar to Sendmail milters. Does the quality of the available filtering mechanisms compare to that of Sendmails? -How "heavy" are they? Sendmail can process huge volumes of mail on surprisingly low-powered hardware, even while doing a fair amount of mail-munging. -What's the maintenance experience like, say 6 months or a year after installation? I don't want something I have to constantly poke. I already have an Exchange box for that.... I'm also open to other suggestions, except Qmail. That looks more complex than Sendmail, and I'm already familiar with Sendmail's weirdness. I know that asking admins about MTAs is like asking coders about languages or editors, so please keep the flaming to a minimum... :D -- -Regards- -Quentin Hartman- _______________________________________________ EUGLUG mailing list [email protected] http://www.euglug.org/mailman/listinfo/euglug
