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?"
>   
>> 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.
>
> 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.

Joe

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