On Wed, 9 Jul 2003, Ryan Finnie wrote:

> qmail itself is da bomb.  It's just people tend to do weird voodoo
> things to it that make it do weird voodoo things itself :)

qmail used to be "da bomb." It's still a great example of security through 
(relative) simplicity and clean design, but because of licensing and Dan's 
wonderfully outgoing personality, it just really hasn't kept pace with 
certain realities.

Case in point: bounces cost money. By design, qmail accepts all mail,
then bounces it if it's undeliverable. Net result: if you pay by the MB,
you just paid twice for that email--maybe even three times if the bounce
bounces.

Postfix, by comparison, can terminate a session much earlier (at
connection, when the sender is identified, when the recipient is
identified, etc.) and can therefore shave some MBs under the right
circumstances.

In general, I still think *stock* qmail is more secure and probably more 
efficient than untweaked postfix. But postfix is reasonably secure even 
when you tweak it, and allows a reasonable level of configurability 
without requiring tons of third-party patches which may very well break 
the fundamental security model.

By the way, this wasn't intended as "qmail sucks," or "postfix rocks." 
Even sendmail can be best-of-breed given the right set of requirements. I 
just wanted to chime in, because I used to be a huge qmail evangelist 
before I realized that there would probably never be a qmail 3.0. I'd 
still recommend it to sites which could benefit from qmtp or require the 
file-level guarantees that qmail provides, but otherwise I'll stick with 
postfix.

-- 
Sen. Orrin Hatch thinks destroying private property to ensure bigger
campaign contributions from media cartels is "good politics." Let your
senators know that supporting corporate vigilantes will bite them in
the political posterior next election day.

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