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Re: default MTA



On Thursday, May 30, 2013 15:48:14, Carlos Alberto Lopez Perez wrote:
> On 29/05/13 08:18, Chris Knadle wrote:
> > On Monday, May 27, 2013 21:02:22, Marco d'Itri wrote:
> >> > Now that we are done with systemd for the time being, can we have the
> >> > flame war about replacing Exim with Postfix as the default MTA?
> >> > 
> >> > Are there any objections other than "but I like it this way!"?
> > 
> > What are the reasons to make the switch?  (I think it's more important to
> > hear the "pro" reasoning than the "con" reasoning.)
> 
> I think that the main reason to prefer postfix is because is considered
> more secure than Exim. It was designed with security in mind.

Security and ease-of-use are at odds with one-another, so you have to 
sacrifice part of one of those to get the other.  [For instance, this is 
likely one of the considerations of why Debian (at least last I checked) 
didn't have SELinux /active/ by default on new installations.]

For Exim, the one thing I would want to change would be to ship a 
configuration that by default created an SSL certificate and enabled 
MAIN_TLS_ENABLE to enable TLS SMTP transfers.  [The Postfix package in Debian 
does this.]  There's documentation and help for doing this for Exim in 
/usr/share/doc/exim4-base/README.Debian.gz in Section 2.2 though, and so I 
suspect there's a _reason_ why this isn't the default.

> This wiki page has a nice summary http://wiki.debian.org/DefaultMTA

I think the negative point of "Support community limited outside of Debian" is 
untrue.  The exim-users@exim.org mailing list is very active and responsive, 
and Exim has become the most popular MTA since sometime in 2008.

  -- Chris

--
Chris Knadle
Chris.Knadle@coredump.us
GPG Key: 4096R/0x1E759A726A9FDD74

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