Re: Debian's mail daemons
On 15 Jun 1997, Rob Browning wrote:
> Alexander Koch <efraim@argh.org> writes:
>
> > (I'd vote for exim if uucp is guaranteed to work)
>
> Ok, so what are the arguments for exim over qmail (at least why do you
> prefer it?)
>
> I've heard arguments for qmail and exim over sendmail.
qmail is supposed to be more secure. Theoretically, exim's design
allegedly means there might be some security issues, but none have been
found yet. There has been argument about this ad nauseam on the
exim-users mailing list.
My own feeling is that the primary disadvantage with qmail is that Dan
decided that sendmail was awful (with some justification) and proceeded to
change a lot of things whether they needed it or not. I am, for example,
irritated that qmail's forwarding file is called .qmail. What was the
point of that? Does changing the name from .forward to .qmail really
improve security?
The bottom result of changes like this is that qmail is not a drop-in
replacement for sendmail or smail. Exim is; it has a sophisticated
.forward syntax of its own, but it does understand pretty well any
.forward for smail or sendmail. qmail does not understand anything but
the most simple cases.
This means that if you have a lot of users on your machine (probably not
the case for most debian sites, but it's an issue as far as I'm concerned)
you will have to re-educate them as to the new ways of qmail (once you'v
re-educated yourself as well, of course). To be quite honest, my 1,300
users have taken a long time gwtting used to how the standard UNIX mail
system works, and they don't want to waste time learning a new one.
For a single user system of course this is not a problem.
Tim.
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T J R Cutts Tel: +44 1223 333596
Dept. of Biochemistry, Tennis Court Rd., Fax: +44 1223 766002
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