[TriLUG] other Mail tranport agents than sendmail

[Jon Carnes]

Well Sendmail gets a bad rap but it is the die-hard of the MTA world.
Most distro's install Sendmail so that it just works right out of the
box - no config mucking needed, just add DNS.

Postfix is lauded because of its security, but recently I've personally
discovered that on a heavy use system the latest Sendmail versions are
faster and handle the large loads with less resources. That's important
to me because of the consulting work I do.  The Postfix configuration
files are much saner than Sendmails and that's fairly important to folks
who just want to play with an MTA. 

Exim is very secure and also operates well under load, almost as well as
Sendmail. It's not as secure as Postfix, and it's configuration files
are bit more wacky, but it's extremely powerful and makes a good
replacement for Sendmail. If I was going to dump Sendmail, this would be
my choice for a replacement.

Qmail.... Well, it's good. Its fast. It does a bit of everything. It's
not *quite* OpenSource, and the key developer is known for being an
arrogant piss-ant. If it weren't for that excess baggage I would say
give it a try.

Those are the big four used out in industry (available on Linux).  There
are hundreds more, but these four get most of the action, and deservedly
so.

If you want a simple primer/HowTo on Sendmail, you can use the one I
wrote a few years back. It still works just fine for the latest versions
(Sendmail is fairly mature so the configuration/setup is fairly
constant).
http://www.trilug.org/~jonc/mailserver/

Jon Carnes

On Sat, 2004-03-06 at 10:13, Ralph Blach wrote:
> What are the other mail transport agents beside sendmail that run on 
> Linux?  I the opinion of the users out there, which is the easiest to 
> configure?
> 
> Thanks
> 
> Chip Blach
> KF4WBK