2000-05-03-10:50:35 cFischer:
> On Wed 03.0500-08:18, Ralf Hildebrandt wrote:
> > You didn't try postfix.
>
> no. did you? is it big 'n nasty?
Nope. Postfix is not big or nasty. It is, by design: simple to
install, configure, and maintain; fast; secure; and as compatible
with sendmail as needed to cover a very large proportion of all
installations.
I recommend it for most installations.
Postfix shares some features with qmail: both of them are much
faster and more secure than sendmail, and simpler to configure and
maintain than sendmail. qmail grew from a different set of goals,
and matured under the direction of a different author with a
different style. It has some strengths over Postfix: it exposes more
of its internal modular interfaces, making it straightforward to do
some exotic and powerful things with scripting glue. It also has
some weaknesses; I at least find it rather more complex to initially
configure and to understand, and at least historically qmail's
author has been likelier to respond to requests for features,
particularly compatibility features to let people keep doing things
the same way, with a straight "no", arguing that they should change
their setup to do things a fundamentally different way. Over time
this has eased a good bit, but Postfix still seems (at least, this
is my impression) to have gained a lead which grows over time, in
support of features to allow it to be a painless drop-in replacement
for sendmail.
But both Postfix and qmail are very fast and reliable and secure,
and they're both enormously simpler to configure and maintain than
sendmail. I'd definitely recommend removing sendmail nearly
everywhere. There are occasional jobs that sendmail can do that
people actually need to do, that Postfix and maybe even qmail
haven't learned to do yet. But they are rare. And if you ditch
sendmail in favour of postfix or qmail, you lose the requirement to
constantly upgrade, since postfix and qmail don't get security
problems requiring urgent mandatory upgrades lest you get burgled.
-Bennett
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