OP: Scalable and professional mail server ? Sendmail. JW: Ha ha ha ha. OP: Please explain.
Yes please Jeff. Of the 40-odd Australian universities about a third use sendmail. So unless you are running something like hotmail, what are the demonstrated scalability issues with sendmail for sites of less than 100,000 users? Scalability no longer depends on the MTA. It is determined by spam and virus checking. It's not uncommon to see one machine running the MTA and ten machines running a scan farm. You might want to consider that prior to its integration of Sendmail's milter interface Postfix had real scalability problems in practice because its poor integration of scanners. Now that Postfix has milter support Postfix is usually the better choice for a MTA. But the difference between PostFix and Sendmail is hardly large enough to be laughable, as you imply. Sendmail could well be the better long-run choice for a large site: it supported RBLs, scanning API and LDAP integration long before competing MTAs and can be expected to continue to have earlier support for features which matter to large sites. I don't see that scalability matters much anyway -- it's a hurdle, once you have enough of it you don't need any more. There are plenty of other criteria to choose between MTAs: security design; willingness to enhance the product; availability of support; and ease or flexibility of configuration. Having a preference for a MTA is fine. We are in the fortunate circumstance of having a choice of reasonable products, so I don't see that discussions like "ha ha ha ha" help people choose which of those products best fits their needs. Best wishes, Glen -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
