Qmail/Postfix/Sendmail for fastest outgoing mail

["Jason Lim" <maillist@jasonlim.com>]

Hi all,

I don't want to spark a flame war or anything... but for purely outgoing
mailing (sending emails), which mail package would be fastest?

I know people have complained about Qmail's way of sending emails... in
that it creates a connection for each email rather than bunching them up
like Sendmail, but then how does Postfix operate (similar/hybrid)? It hear
Postfix does something fancy in that regard that is a mix or something,
but since I'm no Postfix expert, perhaps someone knows more about this?

The reason I ask is that we have a number of Qmail servers right now, and
they are heavily loaded because they also run Apache, DNS, and other
stuff. My idea was to get Qmail to send all email quickly to the "pure
Email box" (mail relay), and have the Email box handle all the actual
grunt work of sending to remote hosts. All servers are connected together
by 100Mbps so no bottleneck there. We can't stop using Qmail on the
multi-purpose servers because the whole system is setup and downtime is
unacceptable, but do you think having the Qmail relay all email to the
Email box, then having them actually sent would benefit? We're talking
about 2-3 million emails per day, which the Qmails have done well so far
but because Apache is getting loaded, Qmail is slowing up and the number
of concurrent connections it can handle has been dropping.

I'm *thinking* it would because then the Qmail servers would not need to
create so many simultaneous connections to slow remote hosts (waiting
around and stuff), and instead would be able to get email off faster to
the Email box and thus free up load on the Qmail servers, so they can do
other stuff more (Apache).

Any input appreciated.

Sincerely,
Jason