I'm building a server machine to host about 3 or 4 different web based applications. It's not gonna be dealing with huge amounts of traffic, but it will have to deal with receiving mail for the various domains.

So I'm not massively interested in setting up an MTA that can handle huge amounts of mail, or one that has lots of bells and whistles features.

What I do want is an MTA that is easy to configure for standard configurations, is as secure as possible, and is simple to upgrade/patch.

I know this whole area of choice of MTA's is a minefield, but I was wondering if anyone had any thoughts on which of the various ones available might be most suitable for the type of setup I have.

Any thoughts?

Thanks.

anything but sendmail
I use postfix, qmail is great but requires a lot just to configure it at first.

exim is a good server to look into.

Again... anything but sendmail

i too am a huge fan of EXIM
i have used it since my debian days
it's the debian mta of choice and debian is very security conscious
it is fast, reliable, and very easy to configure once you get the hang of it

I'm just checking out postfix at the moment. Reasons I chose to go test this first were:

- it's not sendmail
- it's supposed to be easy to configure
- it's rpm based on fedora, which is the distro I'm using
- good security
- webmin configuration module

I managed to install it and swap the system MTA over using system-switch-mail-nox with no problems. I also had to copy a few files from /etc to /var/spool/postfix/etc before I could restart it with no errors appearing in the log. So far so good. Took me less than 1 hour to sort this so I'm happy with that

Being RPM based is handy too - currently the system packages are 100% RPM, which makes upgrading with yum a snap. I want to try to keep everything RPM based if possible, as it just means lots less hassle keeping the system up to date. I also read that postfix releases updates every month or so (dunno if thats true - haven't checked), in which case being RPM based is even more handy.

Webmin configuration module seems sketchy, so I reverted to editing the configs by hand. No real problems there.

So essentially, I've managed to replace sendmail with postfix very easily, and so far it's meeting all my requirements. However, the one last thing I'm stuck is that all mail received is delivered to the root mailbox. Initially postfix creates an alias for root to deliver root's mail to a postfix mailbox, which is fine (and probably more secure) although I temporarily switched off this alias. No mail is being delivered locally, so I think I have a problem with the way postfix is setup.

As far as I know, sendmail requires procmail for managing local mail delivery, whereas postfix does this itself without requiring procmail? Is this the case? I also have read that you could configure postfix to use procmail if you wanted. Anyway, any clues as to where I need to look to get the local delivery working (ideally without procmail) ????

I got this sorted now. I needed to reinstate the alias of the root mail back to a human user. My fault for reading the docs when I'm too tired