Hello everyone.

I am going to be setting up a new email server for my company's LAN.

What I was looking for is a article that has the advantages and disadvantages for sendmail, postfix, and qmail.

Or, if anyone would care to comment on what is best and has the best features, I would love to hear the differences.

Thanks.

Tarballed

I am wading through sendmail problems right now. Lots of support which is good but still haven't properly refined it. Infact I am about to post a problem now.

We also looked into Exim, as well as Qmail and Postfix.

Sendmail does work, has been carefully looked at by many programmers over decades, many of its security bugs have been fixed, and you can almost always easily find sys admins who know how to manage sendmail. We also purchased books on Sendmail which you can't get for some of the others.

I like qmail, there is a good document at:

http://lifewithqmail.com/

I use it with courier-imap and squirrelmail so that I can either use mozilla as an interface when at home and squirrelmail when away from home. The author of qmail is pretty certain about it's security. I'd be inclined to use google and dig around, read posts and then make a decision that suits 'your' requirements. Do you know what your requirements are?...

Hube

As many people have said,sendmail is pretty hard to configure than qmail,postfix.However,if you want some support from sendmail,there are many books in the bookstores about sendmail,while other mail server software doesn't have many support..That's my own opinion.

At last,I prefer using sendmail while I can read many books about sendmail.And it has long and proud history.

i suggest postfix. qmail is not a totally free software thus limiting the production of up to date rpms (well, i use it in RH ). the qmail list claims it is more secure than postfix but i still find postfix easier to setup.

and yes, the postfix mailing list is a lot friendlier compared to the qmail list.

sendmail? forget it.

I've just been reading a bit about qmail today actually after seeing constant security problems with sendmail.
I think after my reading, probably the three choice MTA's are qmail, exim and postfix.
I think you should avoid sendmail.

Hey everyone I appreciate everyones input.

Ultimately, the decision to decide on which MTA may not be up to me. It will be up to the 'suits' at my work.

I am planning on drafting up some documentation describing the differences between sendmail, qmail and postfix. Right now, i am leaning towards postifx.

What I was trying to find is a link of some sort that will describe the advantages and disadvantages to each MTA.

Anyone happen to have a good link I can use?

Any other pieces of input are greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

Tarballed

Qmail is very interesting because it is the only (known for me) MTA with the offered reward for the person who find the valnurability. It was written a years ago and up to now it is working without no patches, etc. So it is really excelent, bug-free solution.
But I am not a fan of idea of running way (the 'service' concept) presented by author and repeated in lifewithqmail web site.
And it is possible to use qmail in 'standard' way like other daemons.

Well, after continual problems with sendmail (despite support) this thread planted a seed in my mind and as a result I spent considerable time revisiting this issue myself. It was a close call between Postfix and qmail but in the end I have decided to go with qmail.

We also had started running djbdns instead of BIND for our DNS servers, and it has been nothing but admirable in performance. For those unaware, djbdns and qmail were both written by Dr Dan Bernstein a university lecturer in Chicago specialising in cryptography, mathematics, etc.

Our experience with djbdns in a production environment coupled with the fact that large mail handling environments such as Yahoo! Mail runs on qmail and the fact that qmail is the second most widely used MTA after sendmail put qmail slightly ahead of Postfix for our organization.

there is no support for qmail at all. the irc channel is like a ghost town and the postfix moderator are completely useless. they have only 1 response, rtfd and the docs are useless....