best MTA?

S

scotty do

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jun 20, 2004
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164
Just wondering what the best MTA is.

Postfix, exim, sendmail, procmail. What should I use?

Here's my setup

Fetchmail gets incoming mail, spamassassin and clamav scan the mail, dovecot imap is used to retreive mail.

I was using sendmail to sort mail, would this be the best for my application? I've read sendmail has some security holes in it.

This machine is on the internet but is behind a router with no incoming access allowed..


Thanks!
 
I set up a postfix, amavis-new, spamassasin, clamav, courier-imap, squirrelmail setup and have had no problems with it. It took some reading, the orielly postfix and spamassasin books are pretty helpful.

It only processes a couple thousand messages a day, but hey, it works.
 
In a relatively small system like this (probably just your personal mail), it's not too important. If sendmail is doing what you want it to, don't fuck with it. Personally, I'd use Exim but that's just because it's what I'm familiar with and what Debian uses.
 
I would recommend using postfix. Simple, Fast, and Reliable. But as said above, if your using it for something small, there's no danger in using sendmail.
 
this is a debian system handling very little incoming mail, maybe 20 incoming messages at most.

sendmail was pretty easy to setup with clamav-milter and spamass-milter....couldn't figure out exim..so many config files.
 
I'm a big fan of the "old-school" stuff...sendmail, imap-uw, spamassassin, clamav, procmail, etc.

If you Google for "freebsd sendmail imap" you'll find my setup. It'll be the first hit. :)

sendmail isn't for the faint of heart, but it's supremely flexible.
 
I run postfix with that exact same setup. It works fine, but if you've gotten sendmail config'd, I wouldnt touch it either. If it works, if its up-to-date, dont worry with it IMO.

My understanding of Sendmail vs Postfix is: Sendmail is better for higher volumes but more difficult to secure. Postfix is easier to configure, but Sendmail can have the exact same security, just takes more work.

Me = lazy = postfix :D

Wait, do you use your box for SMTP as well? If not, I see nothign wrong with your fetchmail and procmail recipies will work just as well. Unless you do a lot of private lan email, I wouldnt worry with postfix/sendmail/exim.
 
No, the machine is not used for SMTP. Well, emails to my username get forwarded to my email address, thats it.
 
I just got around to setting all this up for myself, and figured out you really don't *need* a big MTA if you're not going to be really running a proper public mailserver. If you just want a proper infrastructure to handle your own mail, skip it entirely. My setup just retrieves mail with fetchmail, filters it through procmail (sorting, spamassassin etc), and procmail just sticks it into a maildir structure. Then I use courier-imap as an imap server, with no provision for sending mail *out* at all. Makes the whole thing a hell of a lot easier to configure :). For sending mail, I just configure the mail client to send out using whatever SMTP server it has access to, or I can just use the webmail I set up with squirrelmail, which sends out through my normal ISP SMTP server. It took me a while to work out you could do things this way, but it WFM, whenever I tried to set this up before I always ended up reading a page of sendmail or postfix documentation and going away with a considerable headache...
 
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