Sloan wrote:
> Sandy Drobic wrote:
>> When I started learning about MTAs I tried to understand Sendmail and gave
>> up when even the documentation and how-tos sounded like so much gibberish
>> to me. Postfix on the other hand is documented very accurately. How long
>> did it take you to get a grip on the basics of QMail?
>>   
> Oh, our "look" at qmail was much more high level, we didn't invest the
> time required to get a grip on it. It was research, and then saying for
> each of our main functions "OK, we do this in sendmail, how can we
> accomplish the same thing in qmail?"

Nice. I wish I had the time to do that as well. (^-^)

What were the features that differed the most in implementation or
performance?

>>> details we didn't like - mail queue files were referenced by inode
>>> number, so if we ever had to recover from a disaster, guess what?
>>> different inode numbers, and we're hosed. Also, we had thousands of
>>> aliases and redirects which change daily - postfix and sendmail easily
>>> handle this, but qmail seemed a bit more awkward to configure.
>>>     
>> How were the lookups done, LDAP/SQL or flat files? What were the symptoms?
>>   
> Lookups are done from local db files for optimum speed. The files are
> updated several times a day with automated scripts, but we need our mail
> gateways to be blazing fast, so the potential delay in waiting for ldap
> response from a remote lotus notes server running on windoze was
> unacceptable to us. Now that notes is being moved off of windoze and
> onto a p-series running AIX we may revisit that, but the current system
> works well.

Our domino servers are still running on windows. I am also using a script
to extract all valid recipients with ldap lookups. Even for a relative low
volume site as our company I decided to stay with the script instead of
direct ldap lookups. I didn't have a reason yet to stress test the ldap
server, and with postfix in front of the domino servers I probably never will.

>> Yes, Postfix as well as QMail were developed out of need for secure MTAs,
>> as I just read on http://cr.yp.to/qmail.html. Wietse does take care not to
>> introduce features that waste resources. Probably one of the reasons whey
>> Suse changed to Postfix as the default MTA.
>>
>> Thanks for the view of a (previous) Sendmail user. Did you have a look at
>> Exim as well? When I took a casual look at their documentation it seemed
>> quite nice.
>>   
> 
> We looked at exim, and it seemed to have some nice features - but we
> need to get the maximum mail throughput and minimum latency possib;e,
> and postfix was far and away the performance winner. BTW in researching
> benchmark results, I was unable to find any evidence of qmail's
> purported  performance advantages over sendmail.

I would also like to see some test results done on the same hardware and
the same base of testmails.

-- 
Sandy

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