Re: qmail or postfix
On 3/23/06, Gary Smithe <deb.guy@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> I work at a small ISP with a few dozen email hosted domains.
>
> Our primary server is a redhat box running qmail and vpopmail.
>
> I'd like to switch to a debian box, but have a question that hopefully
> someone can help with.
>
> >From what I've read, qmail and its tools break several Linux
> conventions, so I'd like to go to postfix.
>
> Here's the question:
>
> What are your opinions of qmail / vpopmail (i.e. should I even switch
> from them)?
We used to run Qmail on a huge array of servers (+50) and it works
very well on Debian - you should however not use the qmail-run from
Debian since it source builds a very crappy qmail - G. Pape's binary
qmail/tcpserve packges are much better
(http://smarden.sunsite.dk/pape/Debian/) - one nasty thing about qmail
is the licence which prohibits people from distribution patched
versions as binary packages, thus if you need advanced stuff such as
TLS you will either need to patch Pape's qmail source or run Postfix.-
also note that Qmail has a queue problem when handling large amounts
of email (known as the: qmail-queue silly problem), there exsits
patches which works reasonably well on medium sized email loads but
above 250.000 emails a day the problem seams to come back even with
these patches applied.
Regarding postfix, I can only say that it is a great MTA I do however
miss the simplicity and straightforwardness of Qmail.
Today we run neither of Qmail nor postfix but instead Qpsmtpd (part of
debian testing) - it is very fast (handling 1M emails pr. day pr.
server) and extensible Perl SMTP daemon (still using qmail for local
delivery). Qpsmtpd is by far the most configurable SMTP daemon i have
ever worked with and as a added bonus it reads Qmail configuration
files so the shift from qmail-smtpd to qpsmtpd was very easy.
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