On 06/09/07, Steve Holdoway <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > The last problem with sendmail reported for 8.13.8, over a year ago so I > think your comments could be considered overly critical, given the volumes of > email it processes, it's one of the biggest ( some say the biggest - > http://www.oreillynet.com/lpt/a/6849 ) targets. > > This compares well with postfix, qmail, exim and far better than exchange.
Sendmail: very capable, but with the most disgusting configuration I've ever ever seen. Yes, I've written functional cf files from scratch, before all that macro rubbish :-) qmail: horribly fast, with the second-most disgusting configuration I've ever seen. Plus is has no "features" for extension, without hacking source code that has no understandable license. postfix: does pretty much everything, as long as you find out what unexpected config line to use. Very reliable, seems to be the MTA of popular choice at the moment. exim: the best config file of any I've seen so far - mostly because it is read top-to-bottom in a completely predictable order. Makes growing new features very safe, and is also very extensible. Has an odd habit of maintaining a large "frozen" mail queue, which I find annoying to manage - basically you can't just ignore it for large periods of time. exchange: not an MTA. Not sufficiently standards compliant. Seems to work for "most" uses. Not extensible without "product". Steve, you won't be "throwing away learning" if you learn a new MTA, you'll be "learning something new" :-) even if it is a real considered-plus-actual-experiences reason to continue using sendmail ... BTW, if you're interested in hacking email and you don't have a terribly flexible MTA in place, look at Anubis - it's an SMTP proxy that can provide TLS and authentication, even if your main MTA can't. -jim
