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Debian and Qmail



I examined both Exim and Qmail while I was looking for a new mail
deliverer for the Debian mailing lists. I chose qmail. I guess it
delivers 40K messages per day for Debian without placing a significant
load on the machine I run it on. I especially like the feature that I
can have a recepient-unique address in the envelope "From " header of
list mail. It makes automatic management of mail bounces much more
reliable.

I looked at Exim too. In my opinion Exim is flawed because it marries
mail filtering and the mail delivery agent into the same program, when
these are separate tasks that should be handled by separate programs.
In addition, Exim's delivery seems to be patterned on that of smail,
while qmail's delivery is much simpler and seems to work fine for
everything I've tried to do with it. I've discussed this with the
author of Exim, he doesn't agree with me and we don't seem to have
any emotional problems with being in disagreement. If Exim's mail
filtering were split from the MDA, I might use the filtering with Qmail.

Would I change qmail? If I did, I'd make it possible to use it as a
drop-in replacement for smail or sendmail, simply to make it easier to
deploy. This would involve reading .forward files, delivering to the old
format mailboxes, and more closely emulating sendmail on the command line.
It's clear the author doesn't want to do this, and that's fine with me.

	Thanks

	Bruce Perens
	Debian Project Leader
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