[NCLUG] MTA

[Aaron D. Johnson]

Steve Wolf writes:
> So far I've been able to ignore my server's MTA configuration, but
> the company I'm using to email my RSS feed has gone belly-up and I
> want to convert to a mailer on my server.
> 
> Should I choose sendmail, postfix, or exim?  Why?  Please, no
> religious wars here. :-)

MMDF!

/me runs and hides

Actually, while exim will probably do everything you're likely to
need, I prefer Postfix.  Mostly because I learned it first and never
felt a need to learn exim.  Either is greatly preferable to sendmail.

Postfix's pros:

- Reasonable config file format.  sendmail is quite ... baroque.
  (Yes, the m4 config is better, but I always feel like I need to
  double check a reference manual when making anything more than the
  most trivial changes in there.)
- Minimal configuration is needed to get it working.
  ("dpkg-reconfigure -pmedium" should get you a working configuration
  quite quickly on a Debian-derived distro.)
- The logs are fairly simple to understand.
- It looks like a modern UNIX program.  It's not some alien from
  non-planet Pluto.  (I'm looking at you, qmail.)
- The docs at postfix.org are good.
- It's available in your distro of choice.  (If it isn't you need a
  better distro.)
- Plenty of NCLUGers run it.

What else could you possibly want?  :)

- Aaron