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On Sunday, November 3, 2002, at 12:28 PM, Jon Carnes wrote:
I already know Postfix pretty well (it's too easy to learn, once you know how SMTP works). Sendmail would be good to learn since it is so pervasive. Then again, so is kudzu. Pervasiveness doesn't imply that either one is a good thing to have, though.The two MTA's to choose from are Sendmail and Postfix.
Sendmail is the default of many distributions and is a true work-horse.And to borrow from a thread on [EMAIL PROTECTED], Sendmail has a friendlier license than Postfix. Postfix is encumbered with patent & termination related stuff that isn't liked by GNU *or* BSD folks.
It is one of the best known and widely used MTA's on the Internet. The
main advantage of Sendmail is that it works right "out of the box" so to
speak. Plus Sendmail is the Defacto Mailserver - everything written for
a mail system is written with Sendmail in mind. It is the standard
MTA.
But nobody was too fired up about customizing it. :-) Note that today TriLUG is running on Postfix.TriLUG used Sendmail for 5 good years, and never dropped an email.
The main disadvantages of Sendmail are that it is harder to tweak and it
does not handle virtual domains as well as Postfix.
This is an understatement.
Postfix is rapidly gaining popularity in Linux distributions that are
designed for business use, and deservedly so. Postfix is written to be
secure from the ground-up. It's also 99.9% Sendmail compliant
(Sendmail's alias and supplemental configuration files will work with
Postfix). Postfix is "optimized": it's setup to move the maximum amount
of mail in the least amount of time using the least number of
resources.
It's also a very popular drop-in for other flavors of UNIX.
I would have to respectfully disagree with this. I've gotten it running on several versions of Solaris and OpenBSD. A few years ago I had it running on AIX. Haven't tried it on my OS X box yet. Whenever I get my OpenVMS install media (anybody have some they don't want anymore?) I'll try it on my VAX or my Alphas. I think I've installed it on HP-UX but I forget. In any case, I've not experienced any more difficulty on other platforms than I would have installing other packages on those platforms (usually due to lack of development tools shipping with the base OS).So what's the down side? Postfix is great on Linux but on other Unixes it is not as widely supported or as easy to install.
Out in the real
world (at least for now) you are much more likely to run into a Sendmail
install than a postfix installation.
Agreed.
An alternative to choosing one MTA over another one, is that we couldI think a Postfix class would be a good "intro to SMTP" class, because then you could focus more on the protocol since the MTA just makes sense. I can see Sendmail as being a more advanced class for people who already have a good grasp of SMTP and what an MTA is supposed to do.
have two classes: one that uses Sendmail and the other that uses
Postfix. That would have the advantage of making the class size smaller
and letting some folks attend twice.
If you focus on Sendmail, I'm interested in coming simply because I've not taken much time to learn Sendmail (no more than it takes to replace it).
Chris Hedemark
Hillsborough, NC
http://yonderway.com
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