Linux MTA's

Jon-NC · 15th October 2007

Which Linux MTA do you prefer?

There seem to be three main players, sendmail, postfix and exim.

Are any of the above particularly better than one another? Or does it depend on use? All this choice is confusing.

samb · 15th October 2007

No-one in their right mind would use a program whose config file is indistinguishable from line noise, so that rules sendmail out.

Personally I'm a huge fan of Exim. I've used it in deployments for very large ISPs, and really it's hard to fault it. It's incredibly stable, copes well under high load and basically does everything you need. The Exim mailing list is always helpful and has active developers regularly contributing, so it's pretty hard to beat in terms of support too.

I always found Postfix unnecessarily complex, with a multitude of different config files and poor documentation compared to Exim. I'm sure you'll find plenty of fans of it on here though, mainly because it's the default in most distros these days.

Jon-NC · 15th October 2007

I'm reading a book on Linux which is very biased to sendmail. In fact they only briefly discuss Postfix and Exim. I've used postfix a little in the past and thought it was ok to use.

I suppose a knowledge of all the above MTA's would be advisable. Just interested to know what people think of each.

.

othellotech · 15th October 2007

Sendmail is fine - its rare you have to do much with eth main config file, and keeping the books handy fixes that - it just works, is efficient, and after a while sendmail/procmail/m4 all become 2nd nature

Schumie · 15th October 2007

I'm a big Sendmail user... well, it's the MTA that all of the companies I've worked for use heavily.

Current job is an Exim house hold, but as long as you understnad MTA's and how they work it's just picking up what you know and translating it really!

netserve · 15th October 2007

We moved to exim from sendmail a few years back so that we could use features that we needed at the time.

a) real time Mysql management
b) spam/virus rejections at smtp time
c) a more readable conf file

It's a long time since I've used sendmail for anything heavy so it may have improved but I doubt it.

Postfix has always seemed to be overly complex for what we needed.

philb · 16th October 2007

Do you mean you moved to exim from sendmail? I can't see anyone describing the sendmail config as 'more readable' over exim.

netserve · 16th October 2007

Sorry Phil, well spotted, corrected now.

Jon-NC · 16th October 2007

Exim seems to be a favourite in this case.
Cheers.

netserve · 16th October 2007

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jon-NC

Exim seems to be a favourite in this case.
Cheers.

I'd agree, conf file is very readable and there are lots of cookbooks for very understandable setups.

Support for addons is good, greylisting, spam filtering, virus scanning, autoresponders, mailing lists etc.

Works with Mysql out of the box if you need realtime updates to your mail handling.

It seems efficient and scales well.

BurtyB · 16th October 2007

I'm a sendmail fan/user, I find the config fairly easy these days. I tried postfix for a few months on a couple of my MX servers and I didnt see any great reason to stick with it so they're all back to running sendmail now. I also love the amount of milters available for sendmail.

ChrisB.

netserve · 16th October 2007

Quote:

Originally Posted by BurtyB

I'm a sendmail fan/user, I find the config fairly easy these days.

If you've gone through the leaning curve of working with sendmail.cf directly then it's understandable that you want to stick with it.

burble · 16th October 2007

Debian ships with exim by default, so I use that on some machines, and postfix on others. I find postfix config clearer, but that's down to personal taste, I guess. It is more secure by design though, and as I'm fairly paranoid that suits me just fine.

There's a good comparison here: http://shearer.org/MTA_Comparison

midnightsoftwar · 16th October 2007

Has no-one any experience of qmail? Just seems to jump out as one that nobody has mentioned.

BTW, more of an exim man myself.

burble · 16th October 2007

Quote:

qmail is unmaintained: the author has not released since 1997

That would be my guess