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Re: Advice please: Picking a mail server



Derrick 'dman' Hudson wrote:

> I think both exim and postfix are
> quality mail servers, and thus would chose one of them.

One important distinction, however: Postfix's design is much more
security-conscious than exim's. As I recall from when I used to run
exim, exim runs as root all the time. Postfix, on the other hand, is
split into various components, of which only the port 25 listener (which
doesn't actually handle requests once a connection is made) runs as
root.

As I see it, the pros and cons of exim and postfix are pretty evenly
balanced except for the security issue. Both are easy to set up and are
more than adequate for most purposes. (Though I don't recall the Debian
exim package using debconf for configuration -- instead, you had to run
eximconf yourself, which was less convenient. Has this changed?) So the
security question was, for me, the deciding factor. I switched from exim
to postfix and have seen no reason to switch back.

Craig

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