Migrating away from sendmail
 

I am not an email server guru and do not play one on TV.

I would appreciate opinions about migrating away from sendmail.

Based on flaws with sendmail booting on some 14.2 systems, I am thinking about alternatives. Two work-arounds are mentioned in the original thread. Another work-around is not mentioned -- replacing sendmail.

Replacements seem to be postfix, exim, or a light weight server such as ssmtp or msmtp.

I looked on the Slackware wiki and found nothing related about those mail services.

For job related reasons I would not mind learning a smidgen about postfix, but I need a link or two about migrating. The traditional recommendation is remove the sendmail package when installing postfix, although some people have developed tweaks to keep both installed. To test postfix I would remove sendmail, but are there any sendmail config file options I should copy to the postfix files?

I like simplicity too -- if anybody is using a different approach or light weight MTA then please share.

Usage details: In my home network I long have used sendmail and Slackware. I only use sendmail to shuffle my private network system mails. I send myself mails and alerts to monitor all systems. All mails on all systems are stored in /var/spool/mail and forwarded to the same on the server. I use mail(x) and scripts to send and receive the system mails. For my public facing emails I use Thunderbird and connect to external mail servers. I use Thunderbird to fetch the local mails.

Thanks again. :)

I'm nowhere near an expert, but here's are the steps I wrote down for setting up Postfix to send email locally:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...5/#post5131684

Okay, thanks. One note: I am not interested in relaying to external services, so that part I can ignore. :)

The link did not work. I think the link should be this.

Yah, don't ever do that. :) That's what's ssmtp and msmtp are for.

I swapped to OpenSMTPd about a year back. It's also worth a look.