Hello, everyone.

I am new to the forums as of today, although I have been visiting this site for a while now as I continue to learn more about Linux.

I was wondering which Open Source MTA software you would recommend for a small, but growing ISP startup company. I have looked around online and read about Sendmail, Postfix, Qmail and others, but no one seems to have written a decent article about using an open source MTA in an ISP environment. At least none that I could find which were written relatively recently.

My fear is I will pick the wrong software and find that it does not scale well, or that it's a nightmare to admin in the future. Any insight would be greatly appreciated.

I may get razzed for this, but I should mention that I am coming from a 15+ year career as a Windows based IT admin/engineering background (among many, many other computer-related skills), but have recently started to focus on *nix and open source software in an effort to expand my knowledge. At some point I plan to break away from Windows where it is not absolutely necessary, and have already started this process with our systems at work. This should help explain my ignorance on this matter.

Thanks in advance. I look forward to the ensuing knowledge bomb!

exim would be a good choice.

THIS MTA COMPARISON is brief, but hit's the highlights pretty darn well. I would suggest this as a MUST READ for you when choosing your first MTA


howtoforge has a lot of articles that would fit that bill.. Personally I'm a fan of postfix.
http://www.howtoforge.com/isp-mailse...ysql-centos5.0
http://www.howtoforge.com/perfect-se...64-ispconfig-2
http://www.howtoforge.com/perfect-se...nny-ispconfig2
http://www.howtoforge.com/virtual-us...l-debian-lenny
http://www.howtoforge.com/howtos/email
etc..

EXIM or Postfix would probably be your best choices for a MTA - Both perform well, are currently maintained, and reasonably easy to configure. There is a LOT of resources out there about these two MTA's. The postfix mailing list is very responsive and answers questions rapidly. I do not have experience with the EXIM mailing list, so I can't directly compare.

Sendmail can be overly complex and difficult to configure. this would be like taking on a 900 Lb gorilla while blindfolded.. not for the inexperienced admin imho.

Qmail in it's most basic raw form is VERY Secure and hasn't been changed at all by THE author since 1997, it is NOT free or open source code. , It is a Very basic MTA, which you have to patch to add more functionality, so now that you've applied a ton of patches is it still as secure ? I dunno. some people swear by it.. I just swore at it when I attempted to use it as my first MTA. I never did get it working.