okie dokie so we're replacing our old mail server at work in a couple of weeks so I've been playing around with the different options out there. the current server is running sendmail but I've never had any luck configuring sendmail correctly. I always get a bunch of relay issues.

this evening I installed CentOS 4.1 on a spare machine I had laying around and I configured Postfix and Exim. obviously i configured them both separately, I got postfix up and running, then stopped the service and played around with exim.

right off the bat exim seemed much easier to configure. it worked with very little change to the exim.conf file. I've done some research and it should act as a drop in replacement for sendmail, should be able to handle heavy loads, and performance is on par with the other MTAs.

since this is going to be my first time configuring an email server from scratch, I thought Id ask others what they personally preferred. the server will need to run spamassassin and I'd like to set it up to look at blacklists like spamhaus. (i didn't see that option in the exim.conf file). spam control is my primary concern. the server will need to support both IMAP and POP connections.

on a lot of the CentOS mailing lists a lot of users recommend cyrus. I've never even heard of cyrus until tonight so I'll have to start looking into that as well.

I guess my main questions are what MTA do you personally recommend and why. if the MTA you prefer has a good support forum or mailing list please include a link with your reply. any feedback will be much appreciated.

I used to use Exim, and thought it was really great, but I tossed a coin one day and tried postfix. I find Postfix a lot easier to manahe actually, as while exim apparently seems really easy, I didn't actually have a clue how to do something simple in it without examples and such.

I just got postfix up and running in about 15 minutes. would've been faster but i accidently typed /var/spool/main instead of /var/spool/mail lol

I'm going to try to configure it to use spamassassin, if that goes well then this will probably be the MTA i use on the new mail server i have to setup.