[PLUG] MTA thoughts?

Quentin Hartman qhartman at gmail.com
Wed Jul 18 17:33:24 UTC 2007


It's getting to be time to setup a mail gateway at the edge of my network to
sanitize stuff before it hits the company Exchange box. Originally I had
planned on setting it up using Sendmail, but I have had some recent exposure
to both Postfix and Exim, and they seem to be nice pieces of software and
are generally well respected online. The most attractive thing about them is
that they seem to "do the right thing" for the most, but maintain a fairly
good level of flexibility, without the configuration voodoo required by
Sendmail. As much as I like Sendmail's power, escaping from those arcane
texts is appealing. I did some looking about for comparisons among Sendmail,
Postfix, and Exim and the newest one I came upon was from 2003. I doubt very
much that conversation reflects the world as it is now. For any of you who
have used Postfix or Exim (or ideally both of those and Sendmail) in a
production or production-like environment I ask:

-How well do they do spam filtering in practice? I assume they operate in a
fashion similar to Sendmail milters. Does the quality of the available
filtering mechanisms compare to that of Sendmails?
-How "heavy" are they? Sendmail can process huge volumes of mail on
surprisingly low-powered hardware, even while doing a fair amount of
mail-munging.
-What's the maintenance experience like, say 6 months or a year after
installation? I don't want something I have to constantly poke. I already
have an Exchange box for that....

I'm also open to other suggestions, except Qmail. That looks more complex
than Sendmail, and I'm already familiar with Sendmail's weirdness. I know
that asking admins about MTAs is like asking coders about languages or
editors, so please keep the flaming to a minimum... :D

-- 
-Regards-

-Quentin Hartman-



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