Re: Sendmail or Qmail ? ..
Hi,
First thanks to all who have replied.
We're all busy so I do appreciate the time taken
to tap out a reply message.
It's very interesting and in some ways what I expected.
There is no right or wrong.
Just like programing there is many ways to the top of the mountain.
So for me it's come down to a choice of three.
a) Sendmail
b) Qmail
c) Postfix.
Well Qmail is out I think - for Religous reasons.
See I'm Religous - that's why I use and love Debian ;-)
As for Sendmail, well some say it's full of holes but as
Eric has noted those bugs get ironed out pronto and apt
sorts the rest out ( though I like to compile from source ).
Others say it's hard to understand or configure. That's
true but if you've read the Sendmail 'Bat' book, which I have,
then it's not that complicated at all ( well actually the 200
pages of regular expression's was kinda complicated ).
I've looked into Postfix briefly before and will re-examine it.
My goal is to maximize security. Postfix is well known to be very
secure and stable, some would say it's kinda like an improved Sendmail.
So it looks like a choice between two for me: Sendmail or Postfix.
I think I'm going to sleep on this one.
Again many thanks for your valuable time.
Cheers
Rudi.
> On Thu, 2003-09-04 at 01:43, Rudi Starcevic wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > Sorry to bother you all with this repeat question.
> > I've have searched around and seen plenty of opinions but I'd like to
> > ask again and get the latest from this list.
> >
> > Sendmail or Qmail ? That is my question.
>
> Rudi,
> I work at an ISP that used to use Qmail, but now uses Sendmail.
> There are several reasons why the switch was made, none having
> anything to do with the "religion" surrounding either one. The
> following is my opinion, illustrated with some examples from my company.
>
> First, scale is a consideration. Once we began to grow our customer
> base, our email volume began to increase dramatically. Qmail queues
> everything to disk, so the more mail you do, the more pressure you
> put on your disk I/O. The server running Qmail was always blocking
> while it tried to keep up with the disk writes. We had to decide
> whether to spend huge $$$ on a big-iron server to handle it all, or
> to go cheap and modular using some other MTA. We opted for the
> latter. We replaced our single mailserver with four mail routing
> servers and two mail storage servers, where customer accounts reside.
>
> Sendmail uses RAM more heavily than Qmail, relieving some of the disk
> I/O pressure, and improving performance under heavy loads. In order
> to go modular, we needed a directory service to tie it all together (so
> that each mail router can reference a system-wide config, and figure
> out where the mailbox is). We chose OpenLDAP. At the time (1999), Qmail
> did not have LDAP support (correct me if I'm wrong). Sendmail did.
> Even if Qmail did have LDAP support then, Sendmail's source was
> *much* easier to dig through for the performance tuning we did.
>
> Sendmail's milter plug-in system has also been invaluable when we
> implemented server-side bayesian spam filtering, and as we work on virus
> scanning.
>
> Today we are very happy with our Sendmail installation. Debian and
> Sendmail play very happily together, and with our modular setup we
> process over 4 million messages a day with over 60,000 mailboxes.
> Yes, Sendmail has had several high-profile vulnerabilities, but with
> Debian and apt, we were able to stay on top of it with little
> difficulty. I can see how Qmail could look attractive to a smaller
> site with a less complex setup, but for us, Sendmail was the way to go.
>
> Regards,
> Eric
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