What MailServers do ISPs use
 

Hi,

I was wondering what those "real professionals", Huge companies or ISPs, like AOL, use for their mail server. Is it something commercial, or is it something nice, easy and free like sendmail or postfix?

I asked SBC-yahoo once, but they returned me a totally dumb answer, directing me to their web-space suscription (a moron at tech support probably read the word "server" and immediately clicked on the "dsl and hosting" button...).

I am really interested! :study:

To find out, all you usually have to do is generate bad email - send an email to "totallymadeupaddress@isp.com" and you can usually find what SMTP software they use by how it responds.

I don't work at an ISP, but I most frequently see bounces from qmail, postfix, and sendmail. I don't know of any (serious) ISP that uses commercial mail servers, given the large choice of extremely well-made free options.

I know that my ISP uses Linux but I'm not sure what program they use though. I do know that it has only been down once when they moved something. Their office is in the same place. I guess they moved the servers or something.

I think AOL uses windoze crap. I have read that AOL doesn't work well with Linux and very few have sucess connecting. I'm not sure about Yahoo and the others. You could go to netcraft and see if it will tell you there. www.netcraft.com should work.

I tried to send a email to a unknown user but it picks it up before it ever sends it. All I get is a error saying they don't exist and to recheck the name.

Later

:D :D :D

qmail, exim and postfix (in that order) is what I see most of.

Hotmail used to be backended with qmail. I'm not sure if that's still the case or not though.

Qmail. We use qmail - simple and powerfull.

The easiest way to find out what mail server a site is running is to telnet the SMTP port on the target server.

Mad.

Heh...
We modifyed source code and no one can say, what programm do we use. :-)