[Trilug-ontopic] Trilug-ontopic Digest, Vol 22, Issue 1

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Scott G. Hall wrote:
> Ivan Panarusky wrote:
>> In the coming days/weeks, I'm going to build a mail server. Why?
>> Because I
>> want to build a mail server. Now the question is what mail transfer
>> agent to
>> use. I was reading a bunch of articles and mailing lists, and they
>> all seem
>> to lean to postfix. Any opinions from the professionals?
>
> I've been mulling over the same question.  Besides Postfix and
> Sendmail, what are folks thoughts on exim?  (small network, small
> number of users)
>
> And similarly, for local IMAP or POP service, what do you recommend? 
> I see a lot of recommendations for Dovecot, but what about UW's
> originals, Courier or Cyrus?
>
> Opinions please...
Don't really have any thoughts on Exim, haven't deployed it.

I don't like Courier or Cyrus. Specifically I find that their SASL
implementation is sorely lacking. Saslauthd is a pain to set up, but
dovecot is smart enough to act as an actual SASL authentication source
for postfix with a very minimal amount of configuration for SMTP-AUTH
purposes.

The other problems I had with Courier were its very bizarre
configuration files, its seeming lack of documentation, and its poor
logging implementation. I remember having to chase logging down through
syslog stuff and not getting nearly the quantity of information that I'd
like, whereas with dovecot I was able to track down problems with an
IMAP-to-virtualdomains setup immediately. Oh, and also I couldn't get it
to accept vanilla

It's been a couple years, maybe some of these problems have been
addressed. But I found dovecot to be superior in every way and equally
if not more functional.

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