Re: Advice please: Picking a mail server
Derrick 'dman' Hudson writes:
On Sat, Aug 24, 2002 at 09:47:53PM -0400, Chris Cioffi wrote:
[snip]
| I *really* like Vpopmail's ability to let me login in with
| 'user@domain.com'.
Vpopmail is a POP server, right? Any POP/IMAP server will let you log
in [as any user, if you provide the right credentials].
Vpopmail is a virtual domain manager masquerading as a POP3 server. All
mail goes into Vpopmail and is broken out into whatever account is
appropriate.
Nice features include:
-All mail goes to a single machine account
-Users can authenticate with the full email address and password. This
is th biggie for me. I prefer people being able to login with something
they use all the time. It seems (at least at the setup level) many
systems require a different user for each virtual domain.
| Also default accounts are extremely useful.
What is a "default" account? Is it a spool that receives all mail
addresed to an unknown local part? If so I've configured exim to do
this before. I presume postfix can do this as well.
Defaults are bag accounts. For instance if user@domain.com doesn't exist
it would be sent to default@domain.com (or whatever the default account
is set to be.)
I don't know if postfix has web-based admin or not.
there is a webmin postfix module. There doesn't seem to be one for exim.
| (All web features need to be non-PHP.)
Why? (just out of curiosity)
Just one more thing to cause problems. I've run and used PHP for some
time, but it seems to sometimes be more hassle than its worth. I had
a very bad time installing a Mandrake Apache security fix due to something
PHP was doing. Had to completely remove PHP to get things right.
I also prefer static pages where possible. I use Perl/Python/C where
pages must be dynamic and templating systems for everything else. Cuts
down on server load, too. (The server is getting rather long in the
tooth.)
| I see I can actually stay with Qmail in all this, but I'm wondering if there
| is something better.
Have you read
http://www-dt.e-technik.uni-dortmund.de/~ma/qmail-bugs.html
or
http://cr.yp.to/qmail/dist.html
(which shows why qmail is not Free, as defined by Debian and OpenBSD)
?
This is also quite interesting :
http://www-dt.e-technik.uni-dortmund.de/~ma/postfix/vsqmail.html
I think both postfix and exim are much better than qmail.
| Your thoughts would be appreciated. Thanks!
Thanks for the links. I had been kinda wondering about qmail since it
has been at v1.03 for a very long time. The bugs, while not earth
shattering could easily provide a DoS attack on my machine due to my
limited bandwidth.
I knew qmail wasn't software libre, however at the time I wasn't too
concerned about that. I'm increasing seeing the importance though.
(That's not to say I won't use non-free software, only that it is
something I count against a non-free package.)
The benchmark was very interesting since the hardware it was done on
is very close to what I have for my server.
Thanks! The way things are going I'm kinda leaning to some sort of Postfix
solution.
Chris
--
Chris <chris@stopthesanity.org>
Jr. Birdman in Training(TM)
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