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Re: [LUG] Mail server



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Alasdair Cunningham-Smith wrote:
| Well - the issue I have is being overwhelmed with advice. My cup runneth
| over; I have an embarrassment of riches from which to choose. Can anyone
| offer (links to) an objective discussion on the merits of:
|  * sendmail
|  * postfix
|  * qmail
|  * exim
|  * (others as yet not mentioned)

Objective? Nah not seen any. I don't think there are many objective
software tests that are of much use outside code quality assurance and I
fear qmail would win that hands down, but that doesn't necessarily make
it "better to use". Besides I'm not sure how you objectively measure
things like "author attitude", which might affect your decision (let us
say the author of one of these doesn't suffer fools gladly, and as a
very bright chap the world must seem very full of fools to him).

I can link you to some excellent scalability tests, but unless you're
handling more than about 1,000,000 email a day, you won't find
enlightenment there, and if you know how to configure Qmail, Postfix or
Sendmail, they all scale quite well - it is more about ease of
configuration for scalability (Exim may scale well but I haven't seen it
reviewed in the same tests).

sendmail has an appalling security history, it is just about
configurable with the new M4 macro scheme, but I'd avoid it like the
plague (and I have to use it regularly).

qmail is secure, small, and comes with it's own POP3 server. The main
problem is the licence and the need to apply most enhancements as
patches. Indeed the core source needs patching to even compile on
(modern) Redhat's. (I use qmail at work, along with sendmail, in
comparison qmail "just works", but it has a zillion (okay maybe 10 -
although this includes some fairly sophisticated integration work so
that account information is stored in a database (qmail-sql and
Postgres) and everything is created dynamically as that database grows)
software patches to support what I need, and I even had to manually
resolve some of the conflicts when applying them all).

Postfix, is "just like sendmail" (it was designed as a drop-in
replacement for sendmail), except it has an excellent security record
(and architecture), and is easier to configure. It has lots of features
you'd have to patch qmail for, and is what I use where I have the final
say. Anything sendmail does, Postfix probably does better. It has some
cool features like "soft bounce" for mail admins who aren't perfect
(like urm me), where after a config change you can run the systems for a
~ short period to see if it is doing what you want without permanently
rejecting emails you should have accepted.

Exim I haven't used professionally. It is very well featured, and
thought of. It has an okay security history despite a slightly suspect
security architecture. It is widely used and well integrated into third
party tools.

I'd say use Postfix or Exim of these four. The choice being down to what
other software you are likely to want to integrate. Qmail is okay if you
are not afraid of getting your fingers dirty in the C, but unless you
are a skilled C programmer you probably should be afraid - you don't
want to be responsible for losing email because you got some obscure
syntax wrong.

As a Debian fan, Postfix and Exim are both bundled and well supported
with third party addins and variants in the "free software only" option
of Debian.

An alternative I'm not that familiar with is Courier. I think Neil here
muttered that Courier mail tools provide a good suite of software. It
always looked a bit big and daunting to me, as the suite does everything
(SMTP MTA, IMAP, etc etc), and whilst you can pick and choose, the main
advantage of going this route would be integration of the tools I
suspect. Courier IMAP has a very good reputation, but then the main
competition for IMAP servers was uwimap (which is adequate but not
wonderfully documented and had security problems (and may still do)).

So I guess anything but sendmail is my advice ;) But hopefully you can
get a bit of direction from the comments.

| Also:
|  * ilohamail
|  * squirrelmail
|  * (others as yet not mentioned)

Squirrelmail will definitely do everything you want.

Ilohamail does the basics of what you want in a form that is a lot
easier to install, and hack about. If hacking the PHP about is going to
frighten you, use Squirrelmail. If you want to customise a simple
product to do what you need, go Ilohamail.

Ilohamail was started to provide multilingual support, so if using the
interface in other languages is a big issue, especially if you have
Japanese users, although I suspect Squirrelmail is okay in this regard now.

Am I being contradictory in saying I dislike Qmail because you have to
hack it about, and prefering Ilohamail because you can hack it about? I
don't think so, web interfaces usually need branding or third party
integration, but MTA features are largely determined by well known, and
well defined, standards and interfaces.

In all cases you'll find people on the list who use any or all of these
products professionally, so don't sweat the small stuff.

Probably best to describe your project in more detail, as there are some
interesting prepackaged bundled with different tools already integrated.
Things like qmail-sql.
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