[TriLUG] Which is better?

[Neil L. Little]

I just recently asked that question myself.  I had to install some sort 
of Mail Transfer Agent
that relayed mail generated by a Cisco box.

My first experience with Sendmail was not a pleasant one. Not only was 
it a lot harder to
configure but I also ended up with a porn spamming Zombie on my hands.

In all fairness the spamming zombie part was in part caused by my 
relative newbie ignorance
at the time. The system just wasnt secured as well as it should have been.

My newest endeavor and choice was Postfix. I had it up and transferring 
mail inside 30 minutes.
I can say that Postfix can be a very secure. In fact my initial attempt 
in it "locking down" was so
successful that I literally was unable to send mail to or from the box. 
The resolution was very simple
(a couple of incorrect parameters) and the readership on the TRIlug list 
were very helpful in guiding
through my trials.

In short my vote is for Postfix.

Neil Little, WA4AZL
JARS Forever!!

bak wrote:
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> Anyone who values his sanity and is responsible for anything but the
> most basic SMTP setup would have to answer Postfix.  Any daemon program
> that requires m4 just to build the config file from hundreds of lines of
> incomprehensible macros is more than your life is worth.  Anyone who has
> ever had The Bat Book fall his foot knows just what I mean.  Sendmail's
> milter support is fairly easy to use, however.
>
> Postfix+Dovecot is now turning into a superb way to provide
> POP+IMAP+SMTP with SASL-based SMTP auth and a very flexible variety of
> authentication methods (krb, SQL database, passwd files, whatever).  I
> cannot tell you how simple, flexible, and bulletproof it's been to me
> over the past few years.
>
> Postfix generally is considered more secure due to its habit of
> splitting the work between multiple daemons, each with its own purpose.
>  In extremely large installations routing millions of pieces of mail a
> day this could eventually become a bottleneck, or at least it was as of
> a year or so ago.
>
> Sendmail has had a long and storied history of vulnerabilities, though
> lately it's been far more robust.
>
> qmail is even more robust -- almost ridiculously so -- but as its author
> considers it perfect, and as it's not GPL'd, doing things like
> authentication or delivery into virtual domains etc. etc. consists of
> wedging tiny little programs into gaps between qmail processes and
> praying that they work right and are secure.  Plus you have to run
> daemontools to use it.  Daemontools suffers from the same sort of
> problems that qmail does.  However, for something that just needs to
> shuffle mail around at high speed according to MX records, it's almost
> impossible to beat, and I don't believe anyone has ever discovered a
> security flaw.
>
> - --bak
>
> WA Brown wrote:
>   
>> Which mail server is better? Postfix or Sendmail? What are the differences 
>> between the two?
>>
>>
>>
>> WA Brown
>> vices_faq/ 
>>
>>
>>     
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