Jeremy Portzer wrote:
On Wed, 2004-06-16 at 16:25, Jon Carnes wrote:
[snip]
Interesting comments about performance. That's something I haven't had
occasion to deal with.
Plus Sendmail gets a bad rap. If your DNS is setup properly then
Sendmail (in the default config) will work for 95% of all applications.
I agree with that. I do have one server for which the default configuration is fine, and I'm still running sendmail under the adage of, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." But any time I have to start changing things around, especially advanced features like the masquerading mentioned at the start of this thread, I instanlty replace it with postfix.
--Jeremy, who suspects that most people on this list don't have super high-volume servers.
Okay, I'll play both sides of this one.
Sendmail can be god-awful confusing to configure, and Postfix is *worlds* easier and 95% as powerful. But the performance of Sendmail vs Postfix is not a prohibiting factor. At Intrex we shove about 2 million messages a day through our main Postfix server. That's SpamAssassin, ClamAV, etc. And it's nice and speedy, and handles the spikey load of spam attacks very well. There's no reason you can't tune Postfix to be quick and efficient. Even if you think it's slow, mail servers scale easily beyond more than one machine. Dividing up the load is easy with mail servers (equal level MX records share load relatively equally). Thus, even if performance were an issue, it's not a terribly prohibitive one.
On the flip side, that 5% of things that Sendmail can do that Postfix can't, can be *really* nice. Postfix does not have Sendmail's milter interface. What the Milter interface allows you to do, is reject messages on the fly, as part of the SMTP session, for what ever reason you see fit. Spam, Viruses, Malformed messages, what ever -- you don't generate NDRs, you just say "No Thanks" and stop talking to the sending host. Postfix does not have an elegant way to implement this. You can sit a spam/virus daemon in front of your MTA that's capable of doing it, but that's not an elegant solution. For most low volume sites this isn't really a problem, but for larger volume sites it can be a real headache as queue sizes grow unmanageable.
Anyway, they both have their strong and weak points, but for the novice user I'd agree with Jeremy, Postfix is worlds easier to configure the basics with.
Aaron S. Joyner -- TriLUG mailing list : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug TriLUG Organizational FAQ : http://trilug.org/faq/ TriLUG Member Services FAQ : http://members.trilug.org/services_faq/ TriLUG PGP Keyring : http://trilug.org/~chrish/trilug.asc
