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Re: Evaluating MTA's



On Sun, Jul 14, 2002 at 02:10:24PM -0700, Karsten M. Self wrote:
| on Wed, Jul 10, 2002, Paul Sargent (Paul.Sargent@3dlabs.com) wrote:

| > Not wanting to start Holy Wars, but I'm involved in setting up a replacement
| > e-mail gateway for a company, and I'm wondering what I good choice of MTA
| > would be.
| 
| Marc Merlin, president of SVLUG, indicated a month or so back that he is
| doing research on this topic for an upcoming LJ article.  Discussion on
| linux-elitists:
| 
|     [linux-elitists] MTA roundup
|     Sun, 28 Apr 2002 17:37:58 -0700
|     Marc MERLIN marc@merlins.org 
|     http://zgp.org/pipermail/linux-elitists/2002-April/004314.html

I agree with Marc's conclusion -- choose exim or postfix.

He didn't mention some of qmail's bugs in the article, but you can
read about them here :
    http://www-dt.e-technik.uni-dortmund.de/~ma/qmail-bugs.html

Matthias also did a nice performance benchmark of the "big 4" MTAs here :
    http://www-dt.e-technik.uni-dortmund.de/~ma/postfix/vsqmail.html
(though it is a bit dated now, exim has had several releases since
that point)


Since Marc's comments on postfix are really brief, I'll outline some
of its characteristics here :

.   it is table driven,  you must think in terms of tables and lookups
        to understand how the pieces work together
        (this probably contributes to its efficiency)

.   it is very standards compliant, and also interoperable with other systems

.   it has many components; different programs that interact and
        together comprise the whole system

.   it is very parallel;  as such, it does not eliminate duplicate
        addresses during delivery

.   like Philip, Wietse knows what he is doing and is also friendly
        and helpful on the -users mailing list

-D

-- 
But As for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.
        Joshua 24:15
 
http://dman.ddts.net/~dman/

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