mail server setup questions

[Heiko Wundram (Beenic)]

Am Mittwoch 05 September 2007 21:14:17 schrieb Predrag Punosevac:
> We have a exim at the University of Arizona and works really well (but I
> am just a user not a sysadmin).

Me, personally, I can only swear by Postfix.

I've set up numerous Postfix mail servers over the last two years, and I've 
never had trouble with them as to this date. Postfix is robust (I've never 
had an error condition that _lost_ mails, so far), (actually) pretty easy to 
configure in comparison to sendmail and (IMHO) exim, simply because the 
documentation is extensive and the directives are clear and concise for the 
main configuration (that's for the main.cf; master.cf, which dispatches the 
different parts that make up Postfix, is a different topic, but you needn't 
touch that under most circumstances), and it's easily extensible my its 
extensive use of the generic feature of "maps" for any lookups required for 
configuration options (a map can basically come from anything, such as 
get*ent, flat db files, relational databases, a socket protocol, and some 
other things which you'd possibly not even dreamed about).

By using the Postfix mail filter APIs (completely different to milter, but 
milter is also possible AFAIK in Postfix 2.3+), I've hacked together a small 
Anti-Harvester plugin in an afternoon for the three big servers I 
administered, and there's tons of software out there that plugs in with 
Postfix to do things like greylisting, spam control, mail traffic accounting 
and rate limiting, and the like. The architecture of Postfix I'm talking 
about is called the policy framework.

Thirdly, I don't recall a major security vulverability in Postfix for quite 
some time now (longer than from what I know of sendmail, anyway, but this 
might be my biased vision), and generally, you can expect Postfix to come 
preconfigured "safe", unless you explicitly open it up (which isn't easy to 
do).

On the other hand: besides trying sendmail some years back (I still have the 
O'Reilly sendmail book somewhere on my shelf), I've never tried a different 
mailer in a production environment yet, so the value of my answer may vary. I 
know most of my peers who deploy Debian in server environment swear by exim 
(I should guess because it comes preinstalled and is the default for them), 
but again, I recall the horror I faced when I had a look at the exim 
configuration of my uni when I had to change mail routing (because their exim 
mailserver got blacklisted, and had to route through one of the servers 
administered by me to be able to get out mails at all; that was a happy 
moment in my student admin career :-)).

Anyway, have a look at Postfix, I can pretty much guarantee you that it'll 
suck you in!

-- 
Heiko Wundram
Product & Application Development