Re: Debian's mail daemons
Rob Browning <rlb@cs.utexas.edu> writes:
> Does anyone know of any document comparing comparing sendmail, exim,
> and qmail. The recent discussions and some upcoming installs here
> have made me start contemplating the issue again.
I don't think there's a FAQ, and I don't think it could be objective
if it existed.
I think qmail beats sendmail and smail in every category except,
possibly, extremes of flexibility. If exim is truly close to smail,
then I would say it wins against it as well.
> I've poked around, but came up with nothing. I did see some bits in
> the Qmail+MH mini howto, claiming all its advantages over sendmail
> and other older mailers, but I'd rather have a more independent
> source. Happy to hear personal opinions too.
My two personal reservations:
1) I think Daniel J. Bernstein (qmail's author) doesn't seem to know
how to have a technical discussion without seeming as if he's tacking
an implicit "you stupid idiot" on to the end of each sentence, which
irks me.
2) I understand that he did measurements, and found that it was
faster to do multiple SMTP connections than doing multiple RCPT's for
a single message going to multiple users on a single host, but, I
think he should have done what he basically did in every other
instance and said, "tough shit, it's a problem with your MTA, switch
to qmail, which does it right", and then had qmail do it right (in
other words, quickly).
Absent those reservations, which are not serious, he's written quite a
nice package. I've ditched sendmail entirely for qmail---four Debian
machines and one Solaris box. I've not had any problems at all the
the three months I've been using it, and I'm on several high-traffic
lists, such that I receive ~ 5MB of mail per day. I run two small
mailing lists here at UM, using raw qmail. It is about 1000% times
easier to set up than sendmail, seems to have a much lower impact on
the system, etc.
> Also should the qmail package in experimental be considered at all
> ready to go?
It's worked fine for me. Most of my machines are quite vanilla,
though, so I'm not doing anything exotic.
Mike.
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