[TriLUG] Mail Server options.

[Jon Carnes]

> I guess I'll be the lone voice saying the sendmail isn't the horrible
> beast that everyone makes it out to be.  I use it in a virutal-hosting
> setup, and I have virtual domains, virus scanning, RBL, webmail, TLS,
> SMTP-AUTH, etc. all working without a hitch.  Using M4 config files isn't
> any harder than saying "Give me this feature and this feature, with these
> options".  Only the sadistic edit sendmail.cf by hand.  ;-)
>
> One benefit of sendmail is that, being the default MTA on 99.99% of Unix
> installations, there is a large body of documentation on configuring it.
>
> Postfix seems pretty neat, and I haven't used qmail or exim, but I wanted
> to toss my two pennies in for Old Reliable.
>
> --Wade

Not a lone voice.  I too use and like Sendmail.  Sendmail has a bad rep that
it doesn't deserve.  Most folks have Sendmail up and running on their RedHat
installs and they don't even know it!
Sendmail has been around for a long time and it works.  If your DNS is setup
properly, then Sendmail works properly.

You rarely need to modify the default setup, but if you do, then use the M4
config file.  M4 is very easy to use and well documented.  Personally I have
no problems editing the sendmail.cf file to tweak things like Max messages
size, and max number of concurrent Sendmail sessions.  Sendmail.cf is also
well documented.

I run between 8 and 20 thousand messages through my site each weekday, and
it's up 24x7x365.25 with no problems... Except for that time the new CEO
demanded that I remove max size restrictions from the mailservers, and then
some idiot in Marketing mailed his whole hard drive to everyone at HAHT....
but that only took a few hours to clean up (and I put the restrictions back
on).

Jon