[Sysadmin] Come on then... decision time

[David Kaufman]

John Handelaar <john at userfrenzy.com> wrote:
> 1.  Qmail+vpopmail+mysql
> 2.  Postfix
> 3.  Sendmail
> 4.  Exim

if i were doing the installation, and expected to maintain and administer
it, i'd want to use Postfix.  but this would be my prefereences for purely
personal and selfish reasons:

  a) i use it at home and work and have found it quite easy and powerful
  b) i like being able to rely on apt-get for painless security updates,
  c) i also find qmail annoying to administer, and
  d) i wanna learn more Postfix, esp. WRT mailing lists :-)

but it seems wrong to ask someone else to use it for any of those reasons.
and i have not run any mailing lists on Postfix.  my list-admin experience
was quite a while back, and pure qmail.  if you're doing the work, John, and
you're more comfortable with qmail, i'd say:

  a) go with what you know
  b) since it ain't broke, why replace it?
  c) switch to postfix only if you too agree with
     my selfish b., c. and d. reasons, above.

does

i'd avoid Exim because, although it's the debian default MTA and i've used
it and found it completely suitable for routine system mail, i have read
that in several places that, being a monolithic process (it doesn't spawn
children to handle the incoming connections), exim has lower performance and
more problems when it encounters high loads, large numbers of concurrent
connections, and "plugin-style" virus and spam filters, all of which we'd
expect to have with l.e.o.

[not wasting space on sendmail]

so that's a:
+1 vote for Postfix (with an offer to help),


plus a secondary, conditional:
+1 vote for Qmail, in support of John's, if he votes to stick with qmail :-)

> Other considerations:
>
> If we bring Eric Meyer with us we not only need to warn him about
> it but we also need virtual domain support.

if?

> ...I have NFI how well
> that works with the alternatives (save 1, obviously, cos I put the
> current system in) though I uderstand vpopmail works with postfix.

Postfix and Exim both play quite nicely with virtual domains.

-dave