My comments inserted. > > I'd pause at this point and seek list wisdom on the approach from here. Is > > postfix actually the "best" package to use?
By far the best MTA to use is the one which comes with your $distro and is already preconfigured to a functional state, with final configuration being done by your distro's recommended sysadmin/sysconfig tool. With said tool you add mode of operation and some domain names and that's about it - $distro has already made sure it's safely configured and kept updated. In your case you only need the MTA for sending - that's default config on any $distro anyway, so block off incoming port 25 (on the external interface only - NOT on localhost!) and you're rolling. > postfix is a very good choice IMHO. secure, reasonably simple to > configure, good documentation and friendly mailing list. Ack. Would be my preference. > sendmail - the daddy of 'em all but not the easiest to configure. I'd say only use if you know what you're doing, or if you need some special configuration which is more than other MTAs can handle. There's probably not much sendmail can't be persuaded to do - eventually. Used to have the most shocking security record, but in recent years (5?) has been as good as any other MTA. > qmail - good reputation and used a lot but written by a "difficult" character. "Good reputation"? It's a pain to get going, the mailing list is actively hostile unless you run the vanilla qmail in the default configuration and on Debian, the vanilla one is not the one you want and the author doesn't accept patches and is actively disinterested in making it work on as many *ix as smoothly as possible. Jim reported a while back the error recovery of qmail and exim to be less than desirable. Does not have a drop-in sendmail-style application interface, so much stuff like mailx or anything which expects /usr/lib/sendmail to behave since the beginning of time won't work. Licence forbids to ship modified copies or some such b*ocks. The good point of qmail seems to be that it's reasonably secure, but you need to hire your own IT department to get and keep it running. Good reputation for security (of the vanilla offering, which isn't the one you want), lousy everything else. I'd stay clear myself. > exim - debian uses as standard, don't really know much about it. Seems to exist on the fringe outside of Debian. Unless there's some really compelling reason (which I doubt) that exim has a feature one must have and can't get with postfix or sendmail, I'd stick with one of those two. Volker -- Volker Kuhlmann is list0570 with the domain in header http://volker.dnsalias.net/ Please do not CC list postings to me.
