[PLUG] MTA thoughts?

[alan]

On Wed, 18 Jul 2007, Quentin Hartman wrote:

> 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

I prefer Postfix.  I have not done anything with Exim.

DON'T use Qmail.  It is not very well maintained and spam filtering is a 
nightmare.

There are a number of programs for spam filtering and anti-virus that work 
very well with Postfix.  The config files are very well documented and 
clear.  It is currently maintained.  I use it and I don't have to muck 
with it hardly ever.

-- 
"ANSI C says access to the padding fields of a struct is undefined.
ANSI C also says that struct assignment is a memcpy. Therefore struct
assignment in ANSI C is a violation of ANSI C..."
                                   - Alan Cox