Re: postfix or exim?
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On Saturday 12 Apr 2003 11:29 am, Burkhard Ritter wrote:
> Hello.
>
> I want to set up an internet server (static ip) which should handle some
> mail. It would accept the appropriate mails and users could get them with
> pop or imap. The volume would be rather small.
>
> I had a look at several articles and also searched the mail archieves.
> Apparently postfix is the preferred solution, but I didn't really get the
> reasons for this. Lately I used exim locally and was quite happy with
> this.
>
> What are the advantages of postfix? What are your recommendations?
>
> Thanks in advance.
>
I did look at both a while ago - but I have been running exim happily for a
year. Let me give a the two differences that I have noticed and are my
impression are the main changes. I may be entirely wrong so don't take my
word on it.
Message throughput
With exim all messages go into a single message queue, and if they get stuck
for any reason (can't send out because you have a dialup connection for
instance) you frequently need to scan the whole queue. This can lower the
overall throughput if you have a large volume of messages to process. (I
don't think this is the case if no queue forms) Postfix I never quite
understood, but got the impression that this was not the case and so probably
was slightly faster on throughput
Flexibility with mail manipulation
I orginially stopped using Postfix because I found a problem with configuring
it. I think I was trying to specify an address (mine) that all mail that
didn't have a match elsewhere was sent to. I could only do that if I was
delivering locally, but I wanted to deliver to cyrus and I couldn't combine
the two.
On the otherhand, Exim has the concept of directors and routers which takes a
while to get your head around, but once you do, see immensly flexible. Each
one allows you to make a special checks of the mail, and if it meets the
criteria in the director (or router) you can take special action by passing
it to a transport your name to process it further. Each transport then can
do its own address manipulation and then deliver it further.
This allows you (for instance - as I have) to configure exim to manage mailman
mailing lists without having to know exactly how many mailing lists there
are. Making it trivial to add new ones.
I also do a number of other manipulations that I think would be quite
difficult in postfix
- - spam check mail through an external program and back into exim again (I can
check the header fields to see if the check has happened)
- - allow special prefixes to addresses to bypass the spam checker
- - allow special suffix to local addresses to force them to be sent out into
the internet (via my isp)
etc
- - I pass all messages through a filter and drive my logging from it.
It has always seemed to me (but bear in mind I know understand Exim quite
well, but don't understand Postfix as much) that Postfix's manipulation, was
sufficiently flexible for most cases, but only just so, where as Exim had
flexibility in reserve, and when I needed to do something strange, I have
always found I could.
Hope that helps
- --
Alan Chandler
alan@chandlerfamily.org.uk
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