[TriLUG] sendmail vs. postfix - was Re: stupid sendmail question?

[Aaron S. Joyner]

Jeremy Portzer wrote:

>On Wed, 2004-06-16 at 16:25, Jon Carnes wrote:
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>>[snip]
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>Interesting comments about performance.  That's something I haven't had
>occasion to deal with. 
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>>Plus Sendmail gets a bad rap. If your DNS is setup properly then
>>Sendmail (in the default config) will work for 95% of all applications.
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>I agree with that.  I do have one server for which the default
>configuration is fine, and I'm still running sendmail under the adage
>of, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."  But any time I have to start
>changing things around, especially advanced features like the
>masquerading mentioned at the start of this thread, I instanlty replace
>it with postfix.
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>--Jeremy, who suspects that most people on this list don't have super
>high-volume servers.
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Okay, I'll play both sides of this one.

Sendmail can be god-awful confusing to configure, and Postfix is 
*worlds* easier and 95% as powerful.  But the performance of Sendmail vs 
Postfix is not a prohibiting factor.  At Intrex we shove about 2 million 
messages a day through our main Postfix server.  That's SpamAssassin, 
ClamAV, etc.  And it's nice and speedy, and handles the spikey load of 
spam attacks very well.  There's no reason you can't tune Postfix to be 
quick and efficient.  Even if you think it's slow, mail servers scale 
easily beyond more than one machine.  Dividing up the load is easy with 
mail servers (equal level MX records share load relatively equally).  
Thus, even if performance were an issue, it's not a terribly prohibitive 
one.

On the flip side, that 5% of things that Sendmail can do that Postfix 
can't, can be *really* nice.  Postfix does not have Sendmail's milter 
interface.  What the Milter interface allows you to do, is reject 
messages on the fly, as part of the SMTP session, for what ever reason 
you see fit.  Spam, Viruses, Malformed messages, what ever -- you don't 
generate NDRs, you just say "No Thanks" and stop talking to the sending 
host.  Postfix does not have an elegant way to implement this.  You can 
sit a spam/virus daemon in front of your MTA that's capable of doing it, 
but that's not an elegant solution.  For most low volume sites this 
isn't really a problem, but for larger volume sites it can be a real 
headache as queue sizes grow unmanageable.

Anyway, they both have their strong and weak points, but for the novice 
user I'd agree with Jeremy, Postfix is worlds easier to configure the 
basics with.

Aaron S. Joyner