Dear all,

I want to setup either Zimbra, qmail or sendmail. i have no idea of these three mtas (i am new to these mail servers)but give me the suggestion that which one is better in case of security, fast routing the messages, scalibility and portability and cost. Please share me your experience...

Best Regards

Zahoor Ahmad

i use zimbra for so many years , setting is easy and also upgrade latest software without any problem, all program is ready in one bundle , btw i use that with centos

but need at least 1.5 gb ram min for good production server
and cannot mix with webserver so call dedicated but still can run under xen

and the other 2 is not so heavy like zimbra

+1 on router's comments on Zimbra. Qmail is an older MTA that used to be very popular. It is still in use, but from what I have read it has gone unsupported and is not a good choice for modern use. Sendmail is an old style MTA and is installed by default in a lot of systems. Many more modern MTA programs like Postfix emulate Sendmail's syntax compatibility. It is capable of both sending and receiving mail, but can be very difficult to configure due to the unusual syntax requirements.

I would suggest either Zimbra if you want ease of setup or Postfix if you want a higher performance system. Another one to consider would be Citadel which also claims to be easy to set up and use.

zimbra is a kind of "exchange" replacement, meaning it contains a bundle (pop,imap,smtp,etc) of software that incorporates quite well (incl. calendar etc).

Qmail (odd and difficult MTA), sendmail (oldest MTA, most options) are both MTA (mail transfer agents, other word for mailserver, in the purest form, e.g. no calendar/adresslists etc)

Other well known MTA's are, postfix and Exim.

Most hosts, use a combination of at least two services, operating independently form each other (each service doesn't know of the other).
a pop(and/or imap) solutions, and a mta (smtp). E.g. Dovecot and Exim or postfix etc..
The reason is , that patching/updating is easier, or more customisation is possible, and also that if one service goes down, the other won't, resulting in less noticable annoyances with your users.

To answer your question, the mentioned mta's a zero in cost per product. Exim, Postfix and sendmail are almost equally configurable/feature rich. It's a personal taste (e.g. syntaxing of configs).
all MTA's are (except Qmail) in active development, and updates are done regularly (security fixes e.g.), most distro's have at least one of them in the repo's, so updating is automatic.

It depends on your needs, do you need exchange kind of functionality, then zimbra is an easier choise, if you just want email (incoming/outgoing) tranfers, then go for postfix, sendmail or exim (mta) and a pop/imap solution like, e.g. dovecot.

+1 for zimbra. using it for more than a year now, reliable, scalable, fast, easy to setup.

+1 for zimbra. -10 for qmail