[Sysadmin] Should we switch mail server software?

[David Kaufman]

Pruned and grafted from the "setting up qmail" thread, as to the question 
of:


What MTA evolt.org *Should* Use
===============================

Opinions voiced so far,

"Dean Mah" <dean.mah at gmail.com> wrote:
> ...I don't have a preference.


"John Handelaar" <john at userfrenzy.com> wrote:
> From here, on balance, I'm not sure we shouldn't go with exim4 this
> time.  I'm told the speed is much the same or better (and frankly it's
> not like LEO is exactly nippy these days), it's security-covered and
> one assumes that mailman and clamav and spamd integrate rather more
> easily.
>
> I'm happy to be told otherwise since Dean's actually been running the
> thing and adding shims and sticky tape to ameliorate some of our
> current MTA's horrors for the last few years on his own.


"William Anderson" <neuro at well.com> wrote:
> My two pence.  qmail should die an evil death, there's no need for us to
> run it.  I'd personally prefer postfix to exim as it's somewhat simpler
> to manage, but if the preference is to run exim, that's fine with me, as
> long as we at least spend a few minutes seeing if it's worth unifying
> the awful, broken-into-tiny-pieces debian default config files.


"Dean Mah" <dean.mah at gmail.com> replied:
> I still don't have a preference.  As long as we can setup dedicated
> outgoing and incoming smtp servers and handle the multiple domains,
> that gets us a long way.  I've been inside the code of the old
> postfix, so I am familiar with the architecture and code base (not
> that I anticipate having to hack the source again).  I can learn exim.


"Eduardo Kienetz" <eduardok at gmail.com> wrote:
> I've always used Postfix+Courier-IMAP in clients, but I'm eager to
> test Courier MTA+Courier-IMAP.
> http://www.courier-mta.org/
>
> I would hardly use Qmail nowadays, but I don't really have anything 
> against it.

And, me, I like and have used qmail, at work and for personal use, for 
eight years now, and I believe we should continue to use it at evolt.  I've 
only used Exim on machines which simply needed a default MTA to support 
local mail clients and to send mail to external SMTP servers, never *as* an 
SMTP server.  And I've only used Postfix once, for a client who insisted. 
It was not bad, but I wasn't involved with it long enough to gain any 
expertise, or to form any real opinion.

I defend my lack of experience with other MTA's by pointing out that qmail 
works so well, is so easy to configure, and has had so few security 
problems, I've never even needed to evaluate another email solution :-)

-dave