[Techtalk] choice of MTA

Rasjid Wilcox rasjidw at openminddev.net
Sat Feb 21 12:34:16 EST 2004


On Saturday 21 February 2004 10:11, Katie Bechtold wrote:
> On Sat, Feb 21, 2004 at 09:46:13AM +1100, Rasjid Wilcox wrote:
> > I have used qmail a lot (although not on Debian) and it has some distinct
> > limitations (although it does have good points too).  Can I ask why you
> > have chosen qmail rather than postfix?
>
> Previous experience, mostly.  I didn't want to have to learn all
> about a new MTA.  Also, I like Dave Sill's documentation for qmail
> and I got the impression it's a pretty secure MTA.  I have zero
> experience with postfix, so I can't really compare the two.

Fair enough.  I have far more experience with qmail than postfix, but have 
decided to switch.  As far as I can tell, they both have a similar approach 
to security (small components that don't trust eachother and most run without 
root privilages) and a similar security record (ie, much better than 
Sendmail).

The main reason I'm switching over to Postfix is because qmail has not been 
actively developed by Bernstein for years, and due to the license 
restrictions (ie, no-one else can really develop it - only make patches 
available) many 'modern' features are missing[1].  Generally you can only get 
extra features either by replacing certain components of qmail with 'drop in' 
replacements, or by applying patches to the source yourself and recompiling 
manually.

So far I have found Postfix easy to work with, but I'm really just in the 
early stages of working it all out.

Cheers,

Rasjid.

[1] Including simple things like rejecting unknown users at the SMTP level 
rather than accepting the mail and then generating a bounce.

-- 
Rasjid Wilcox
Canberra, Australia (UTC +11 hrs)
http://www.openminddev.net


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