also sprach Antropov Anton <dicobraz@mail.ru> [2002.01.21.1231 +0100]:
> > Also, which mailserver would you recommend? (I have to learn one
> > anyway.)
> I'd recommend QMail. Why? - Read some mailing lists... And this is commonly
> the question of religion.
and i'd recommend postfix.
trying hard to stay away from a religious war, i am keeping this as
factual as possible. postfix and qmail don't really have any functional
differences. both can do the same, both have the same features, and both
are very powerful and cool.
however, they use completely different configuration paradigms, and
while there is little to be said against doing it the qmail-way, postfix
seems more intuitive to the newbie who's always only worried about
configuration files. qmail does not have a configuration file like
postfix, it uses a mixture of directory hierarchies, filenames, and
contents to configure the mail server. once you understood the paradigm,
you can do whatever you want, as said.
if you aren't used to qmail, then it will have a steeper learning curve
than postfix. i am sure some folks will disagree. the only way to answer
it for yourself is to try them both.
finally, it has to be mentioned that qmail's author, DJ Bernstein, is an
excellent coder, just like postfix's author Wietse Venema. postfix is
fully open-source and GPL, while qmail has a rather ridiculous
propriertary license, preventing a binary distributions as we have it
with .deb packages. the qmail package maintainer has done a good job
though, and while you need some -dev libraries to install qmail, it's
more or less automatic.
*but*, and this is something that i probably shouldn't state here, but
which i feel important. it's not about the functionality of the
software, it's about the principle. Wietse, the author of postfix,
advertises it as "competitor" of qmail, not "enemy". DJB, the author of
qmail, on the other hand, chooses to be present on the mailing lists of
"competing" software (like postfix-users or bind9-users) and publicly
*trashes* the "competing" software, constantly telling the users that
his product, qmail or djbdns respectively, doesn't suffer from such
"childish sicknesses," and that instead of using the mailing list to
solve their problems, they should switch to his software and not
experience the problems. for me, that's reason enough not to support
him. you are free to make up your own will though. especially because
even though his software is good, it is not flawless!
--
martin; (greetings from the heart of the sun.)
\____ echo mailto: !#^."<*>"|tr "<*> mailto:"; net@madduck
die wahrheit ist selten
auf seiten der wahrscheinlichkeit.
-- heinrich v. kleist
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