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Date:      Thu, 11 Aug 2005 21:34:53 -0700
From:      "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm@toybox.placo.com>
To:        "Tom Norris" <tom@trancegeek.net>, <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org>
Subject:   RE: Any suggestions for a MTA for a new admin?
Message-ID:  <LOBBIFDAGNMAMLGJJCKNAECPFCAA.tedm@toybox.placo.com>
In-Reply-To: <42FBC5BF.9060705@trancegeek.net>

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Sendmail, of course.

Postfix and qmail and the others were written by people
aiming to simplify the MTA because they either couldn't
understand Sendmail or were too lazy to do so.  Or they
were catering to people like this.

Sendmail was written by a huge crew of people along the way
as they came across weird mail handling issues that they
needed to solve.  As a result it is extremely flexible and
can be used to do anything imaginable.  As a result of this
there are naturally far more switches to set.  However, most
of these switches are set in a default position that you
would normally never change.

If you are serious about handling mail vs just playing
around with a mailserver in your home or something, then
sooner or later, sure as atomic decay, your going to run
into a problem in mail handling that you may swear that
is the stupidest thing imaginable and why would anyone ever
want to do it - but your going to have to do it.  With
Sendmail it is just a matter of toggling a few switches.
With the other ones it's a matter of going into weird contortions
and gryrations to get them to do weird things, if they can
do it at all.

If you were to modify qmail to do all the things Sendmail
can do, you would have a result just as complex as Sendmail.
Same goes for the rest of them.  So, the configuration complexity
of Sendmail, far from being a detriment as some other people
have inferred, is in reality exactly what you want in an MTA.
And keep in mind that the Sendmail people have worked out
schemes to greatly simplify that complexity, for at least for
typical types of scenarios, using prewritten templates.

Ted

>-----Original Message-----
>From: owner-freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
>[mailto:owner-freebsd-questions@freebsd.org]On Behalf Of Tom Norris
>Sent: Thursday, August 11, 2005 2:40 PM
>To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
>Subject: Any suggestions for a MTA for a new admin?
>
>
>I have finally made the jump from paying people to host my websites to
>doing it myself (setting up apache, perl, php, postgresql, and all that
>fun stuff.)  Now I want to migrate my e-mail addresses over to
>a FreeBSD
>4.11 machine that lives in a data center.  Can any of you recommend a
>good MTA (and maybe a book) for someone that knows relatively
>few things
>about the big scary world of e-mail transport?
>
>Just to throw it out there, one of the things I need to do is to have
>the MTA route mail for a few different domains that are pointed towards
>the machine on different ip addresses.  Is that possible?
>
>
>Thanks,
>Tom Norris
>_______________________________________________
>freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list
>http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
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>
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