Re: Newbie: Is there a basic Debian-for-ISP HOWTO?
Hi,
On Mon, Jul 29, 2002 at 09:55:20AM -0700, Angus Scott-Fleming wrote:
> any comments on qmail or procmail vs sendmail welcome. I've
> heard Bad Things about sendmail's complexity but it _is_ the
> standard ... what do you use for MLM? mailman?
Let's compare apples with apples here ;-)
Qmail, postfix, exim and sendmail are Mail Transfer Agents, or MTAs.
These receive messages from the system or the network, and route them to
local or remote destinations. For remote destinations, SMTP is used most
of the time; for local destinations it can deliver to an mbox file or
Maildir, or it can invoke a separate mail delivery agent.
Procmail is such a Mail Delivery Agent or MDA. An MDA specialises
exclusively in local delivery to various (types of) files, based on
various criteria. In principle it receives messages only from an MTA,
not from the network or other local programs.
Mailman is a mailing list manager. To run a mailing list, you also need
a suitable MTA to receive list messages from the network and to send
them to subscribed members.
In short, you can only compare qmail and sendmail. Not only does the
latter have a bad reputation for complexity, but for its amount of bugs
and lack of security as well.
It may still be the standard MTA in certain commercial unixes, but IMHO
the advantages offered by that (whatever they may be) won't outweigh the
drawbacks for most people.
I personally love qmail for its elegance and security track record. It's
not hard to set up, and quite modular and versatile. You may or may not
be bothered by its (lack of) license, I don't know.
I like mailman as well. I've personally only used it for small lists so
far, but it seems to be successfully used for much bigger ones (this
list for example).
HTH,
Emile.
--
E-Advies / Emile van Bergen | e-advies@evbergen.xs4all.nl
tel. +31 (0)70 3906153 | http://www.e-advies.info
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