[NTLUG:Discuss] Linux Mail servers

[Mark Bainter]

Douglas King [daking at dak1.net] wrote:
> Anyone have any recommendations for a mail server?  I need the ability to 
> provide POP3, SMTP, and web mail on MULTIPLE domains.  Any help would be 
> greatly appreciated.

Gonna buck the trend here and suggest Qmail.  Sendmail is large
and ungainly imo.  Doing any hacking in it whatsoever is an 
exercise in madness.  And, there's a reason the config file looks
like someone wrote it by banging their head on the keyboard. ;-)

Qmail is much more cleanly written, and follows the unix standard
of doing one thing and doing it well.  It's made up of smaller 
pieces each doing their own part, which works wonderfully.

Benchmarks I and/or associates of mine have done show Qmail capable
of pushing greater than a million messages a day on an old PII machine
vs 190k on a well tuned sendmail machine.  -shrug-  And it can do even
better if you do a little kernel hacking and push up the number of open
filehandles and processes are allowed.  

I'm not trying to say sendmail doesn't work, I used it for years.  It's
certainly better than mmdf (which was the first mailserver I learned).
However, these days I wouldn't dream of running sendmail on a publicly 
available box.  IMO, it's tantamount to running IIS.  I've never actually
looked, but I'd imagine sendmail probably ranks tops or close in unix
application vulnerabilities.  Though some apps like Wu-FTPD would probably
give it a run for its money.  ;-)  And that's only partly due to how long
it's been around.

http://qmail.org is the main site, but if you are looking to install
and have an rpm based system I recommend you look at 
http://untroubled.org.  Getting your rpms from Bruce will save you 
time and effort.