On Wed, 18 Jul 2007, Quentin Hartman wrote: > 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:
I use postfix, it's very simple to use to do simple things, yet very powerful. I used exim a long time ago, it was working fine, but was more complicate, not as secure (more parts running as root, no clear separation between multiples process like postfix and qmail do), and slower, but I don't know how it has evolved. > -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? For filtering you can use something like procmail or maidrop. And you can add before the filters spamassassin, clamav, greylisting (using postgrey) and blacklists and other things like that. > -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.... For me that's no maintenance, until something is broken, which is rare. Maybe security updates for postfix (rare) and tools like spamassassin, but that should be very quick if you're using the packages from a supported distribution. > 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 Yes, don't use qmail. It's sad because the design is good, and the code seems to be good quality. But it is not open source and now unmaintained by its author. Also it puts its files in weird places. Nicolas _______________________________________________ EUGLUG mailing list [email protected] http://www.euglug.org/mailman/listinfo/euglug
