Date: Wed, 5 Sep 2007 23:58:18 +0200 From: "Heiko Wundram (Beenic)" <wundram@beenic.net> To: Predrag Punosevac <punosevac@math.arizona.edu> Cc: Andrey Shuvikov <mr.hyro@gmail.com>, freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: mail server setup questions Message-ID: <200709052358.19718.wundram@beenic.net> In-Reply-To: <46DF0009.1010301@math.arizona.edu> References: <80f4f2b20709041503g3b3f85d1oa6a09b110ac31d7b@mail.gmail.com> <24393ae80709051205j211b7ae4p54ea2f9d94b3c5e3@mail.gmail.com> <46DF0009.1010301@math.arizona.edu>
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Am Mittwoch 05 September 2007 21:14:17 schrieb Predrag Punosevac: > We have a exim at the University of Arizona and works really well (but I > am just a user not a sysadmin). Me, personally, I can only swear by Postfix. I've set up numerous Postfix mail servers over the last two years, and I've never had trouble with them as to this date. Postfix is robust (I've never had an error condition that _lost_ mails, so far), (actually) pretty easy to configure in comparison to sendmail and (IMHO) exim, simply because the documentation is extensive and the directives are clear and concise for the main configuration (that's for the main.cf; master.cf, which dispatches the different parts that make up Postfix, is a different topic, but you needn't touch that under most circumstances), and it's easily extensible my its extensive use of the generic feature of "maps" for any lookups required for configuration options (a map can basically come from anything, such as get*ent, flat db files, relational databases, a socket protocol, and some other things which you'd possibly not even dreamed about). By using the Postfix mail filter APIs (completely different to milter, but milter is also possible AFAIK in Postfix 2.3+), I've hacked together a small Anti-Harvester plugin in an afternoon for the three big servers I administered, and there's tons of software out there that plugs in with Postfix to do things like greylisting, spam control, mail traffic accounting and rate limiting, and the like. The architecture of Postfix I'm talking about is called the policy framework. Thirdly, I don't recall a major security vulverability in Postfix for quite some time now (longer than from what I know of sendmail, anyway, but this might be my biased vision), and generally, you can expect Postfix to come preconfigured "safe", unless you explicitly open it up (which isn't easy to do). On the other hand: besides trying sendmail some years back (I still have the O'Reilly sendmail book somewhere on my shelf), I've never tried a different mailer in a production environment yet, so the value of my answer may vary. I know most of my peers who deploy Debian in server environment swear by exim (I should guess because it comes preinstalled and is the default for them), but again, I recall the horror I faced when I had a look at the exim configuration of my uni when I had to change mail routing (because their exim mailserver got blacklisted, and had to route through one of the servers administered by me to be able to get out mails at all; that was a happy moment in my student admin career :-)). Anyway, have a look at Postfix, I can pretty much guarantee you that it'll suck you in! -- Heiko Wundram Product & Application Development
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