[NCLUG] MTA

Quentin Hartman qhartman at gmail.com
Fri Nov 30 11:11:03 MST 2012


Another +1 to Postfix. After admining email for many years, I feel like it
has the best balance of features and performance and whatnot. It's simple
to get setup, but flexible enough to cover broad use cases. It's far and
away my favorite

Sendmail is of course awesome, if you like deep black magic, but more
hassle than it's worth for the vast majority of situations. If you need to
do really weird mail routing backflips or handle large volumes of mail with
the computing power of your pocket calculator, there's really no other
choice.

Exim I kinda hate, it's just weird to me, and doesn't seem to offer
anything compelling enough to make it worth further investigation.

QH


On Thu, Nov 29, 2012 at 7:05 PM, Bob Proulx <bob at proulx.com> wrote:

> Hi Steve,
>
> Steve Wolf wrote:
> > 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. :-)
>
> What everyone else said (good stuff, couldn't have done better) plus:
>
> Sendmail is a single large monolithic program that runs as root.  That
> gives it a large attack surface area to defend against.  If you can
> crack it then you are in as root.  Postfix by contrast runs smaller
> dedicated programs as a non-root user trapped in a chroot.
>
> Sendmail uses a Turing-complete rewrite rule language that is in some
> ways similar to sed.  I like sed.  But I find working with the
> sendmail rewrite chains to be like reworking someone else's assembly
> language programs.  They can easily be write-only code.
>
> Postfix operates mostly by decision tables.  Almost any particular
> decision to be made during the handling of an email message is made by
> the contents of a decision table.  The tables are quite straight
> forward.  For example if you want to route mail differently based upon
> destination then in Postfix a transport table would list a destination
> on the left hand side and the way to get there on the right hand side.
> That is a relatively simple but powerful paradigm that is easy to
> understand and maintain.
>
> Exim seems to perform just fine and is certainly a contender.  I would
> find it hard to criticize since a lot of people use it and like it.
> But on systems that I access that run exim I just find it strange.  In
> a subjective and hard to quantify way.
>
> I use and recommend Postfix.
>
> Bob
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