On 7 Sep 2019, at 7:10, Graeme Fowler via Exim-users wrote:

On 7 Sep 2019, at 11:13, Cyborg via Exim-users <[email protected]> wrote:
The question is, what is the reality?

Nobody really knows.

The fact that Exim is/was the default MTA in a couple of distros means there’s an awful lot of systems running it out there.

Another source of inflation in the Exim numbers is that it is the only MTA available for cPanel and it is commonly up and answering at the MX for every domain hosted on a cPanel host, even if it isn't actually functional for the domain, with one actual Exim instance possibly serving scores of domains that frequently have few or no real users each but may have many users.

But… nobody really knows for sure.

There's also a problem in how one counts "mail servers." Is that MTA instances? Domains? Physical hosts? OS instances? What about one OS instance running multiple independently administered MTAs? (think: FreeBSD jails.) Is a load balanced HA cluster 1 server or many?

One of the cited sources (Security Space: http://www.securityspace.com/s_survey/data/man.201908/mxsurvey.html) does their survey by domain but only gets an identifying banner from 51% of the MX records they chase. Of those, Exim is 57%. That is NOT an unbiased sample. I can't quantify the biases but I would expect that Exim is greatly over-represented in the "identifiable" half simply because of the cPanel effect, which is consistent with the fact that 3/4 of the identified Exim domains are running 4.92.



--
Bill Cole
[email protected] or [email protected]
(AKA @grumpybozo and many *@billmail.scconsult.com addresses)

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