[Gllug] Mail servers, was: [Gllug] I found this link

[John Edwards]

On Sun, Sep 23, 2001 at 02:40:40PM +0100, Alex Hudson wrote:
> On Sunday 23 September 2001 14:19, Mike Brodbelt wrote:
<snip>
>> I've had one friend who's site
>> converted from sendmail to Exim, who complains that Exim has silently
>> lost mail, which is the ultimate sin for an MTA. I've never had any
>> trouble with sendmail, when configured right.

"when configured right" speaks volumes where sendmail is concerned.
But instead of hand hacking the sendmail.cf file RedHat has a sendmail-cf 
rpm that contains that m4 macros that you can use to build it from a set 
of human readable definitions. I would still say that even using those are 
more difficult than most other mail server configurations.


> I'm not personally an exim fan either; although I've never had _huge_ trouble
> with it. If you don't configure it properly, it won't tell you when it 
> freezes mail in the mail queue, for example. Thawing frozen mail is also a 
> big pain in the ass and I've also had no idea how to get it to recognise 
> multiple smart-host configurations (for sending mail from my laptop, which 
> obviously connects to the internet on different networks depending where it 
> is). 

I've only used Exim on a few Debian workstations running as satellites 
and haven't seen any loss of mail, but they are not under any load.

Many big mail servers seem to run Exim; btinternet, demon, clara, 
global.net.uk, mailbox.net.uk, even the gllug mail list server uses it.

Debian has a nice basic exim configuration script for new users that will 
set it up for the more common situations. Maybe you can find in debian's
exim.diff.gz ?


> The only thing I don't like about qmail is the license. 

The license is odd (no binary distribution, etc), and setting it up in the 
recommended method does require learning a different view of how daemons 
are controlled. But it's very solid, no security holes in the past four 
years, Maildirs are a blessing (one email per file stops mailbox corruption),
the control settings can be changed without restarting the daemons.

There are even source RPMs available from www.qmail.org for qmail and it's 
related tools.

> I'm currently 
> experimenting with the courier suite, mainly to replace the ageing system we 
> have at work. I want imap, basically, but I don't want to run bits & pieces, 
> so it's going to be full courier rather than [qmail|exim|sendmail] + 
> [qpopper|cucipop|pop3d] + [courier-imapd|wu-imap|cyrus] etc. For boring 
> crappy pop3, though, I prefer qmail over anything else currently. It's very 
> easy to setup and setup correctly - it's just a pain in the ass that ESR's 
> crappo 'fetchmail' doesn't always deliver mail correctly and qmail rejects it
> :( 

The only problem I've had between the two is when I tried to sort delivery 
of emails from a multidrop POP3 account based on the To: address.

> Cheers,
> 
> Alex.

ps. Thanks goes to Walid for the introduction to qmail day he ran a few 
years ago.

-- 
#------------------------------------------------------------------------#
|    John Edwards    Email: John.Edwards at uk.com                          |
|                                                                        |
|  "Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these    |
|   were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of   |
|   paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green   |
|   pieces of paper that were unhappy." - Douglas Adam on unhappiness    |
#------------------------------------------------------------------------#

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