Postfix vs qmail- which is better?

iansilv

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jun 10, 2004
Messages
335
Does anyone her have experience with either of these mass mail solutions, or can suggestion a better alternative to the two?
Thank you.
 
Ever since I picked up on gmail I never looked back to any other provider.
 
i mean for writing a program around- as a component for a program that needs an email server.
 
Ever since I picked up on gmail I never looked back to any other provider.

qmail, not gmail. He's asking about mail transfer agent programs, not providers.

iansilv -- what is your definition of "better" in this context?
 
Better= scalability, bug-free working code, and ease of integration with a web application
 
Personally, I prefer postfix. It's still maintained regularly and it's easy to configure. I don't know too much about qmail but I heard the original source hasn't been updated since '97 and there's patches for patches to the program. Someone correct me on this if I'm wrong.
 
considering qmail hasn't been developed in YEARS, it's pretty impressive (for it's time). Without a doubt, Postfix is going to be a much more scalable solution. I have a qmail server right now that sends on average, 1,000,000 mails a day, I am working on migrating off to a Postfix server instead because we've really hit a wall as far as capabilities of the qmail server. Don't get me wrong, like I said originally, qmail is an impressive app, it just isn't as scalable.
 
I have been using Postfix for a while now and found it fits my needs very well. Since I am using it along with dovecot it's nice that it supports utilizing dovecots authentication system as well. I have both configured to use MySQL to handle the virtual domains and accounts and it has worked out nicely thus far.
 
Does anyone here do development on these types of systems? what do yu guys use the programs for? Internal company systems, external programs, etc?
 
in late 2007 is/was due a book on Exim.
(new edition). its chapter 20 is/was/could_have_been
on my todo list
..........
iirc
 
Exim is just another MTA, like Sendmail, Postfix, qmail, Courier...

Out of your original two, I like Postfix more since it's what I have worked with for my website. It is pretty easy to use and easy to get it to work with additional things like dovecot (for IMAP), and comes with features like SMTP over TLS already built in.

qmail's core has been out of active development for several years and so functionality that you would get out of box with Postfix (like SMTP over TLS) have to be added in with patches and add-ons. This means you have to also maintain patches and such and keep them in order.

Postfix over qmail, it is still a rather secure MTA (though perhaps not as secure as qmail, I'll have to read up on the current status), is still under active development, and comes with more stuff out the box.
 
My 0.02:

http://www.qmailtoaster.com/

Have used it for years and having been working with UNIX for many more. Very scalable, very robust and this particular distribution of QMail is pretty damn rock solid and feature-rich, too.

YMMY, as always.


- Stan
 
what is exim and what is in chapter 20?

**If** I recall correctly , exim (like sendmail) comes in one large binary rather than many small ones
like (postfix and qmail), but has an easier configuration than sendmail (usually)
depending upon how much tweaking one wants in the end. I wouldn't try it
without the aforementioned book (see amazon...)
.................
chapter 20 (recollection more vague here) may have to do with
"smart-host" etc (for dialup machines)
 
At my last job we used Qmail, about 250,000 customers.

A good guide to get you going http://www.lifewithqmail.org/

If you want security, stability and scalability I would go with qmail.
It is very scalable because the whole mail system is modular, every part of your system can be offloaded on to more servers if needed.

In 1997 the author offered 500$ to the first person that could find a security hole in qmail, and that offer still stands.
http://cr.yp.to/qmail/guarantee.html

I generally like all the software that DJB(Daniel J. Bernstein) has written.


Though I do like plugin for Postfix called policyd, sender throttling from that is a good way to find and kill spammers. We used this as an interim smtp server for out going mail before it hit the qmail servers for delivery.
 
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