[NTLUG:Discuss] new mail server options

[Kelledin]

On Wednesday 12 January 2005 12:57 pm, MontyS at videopost.com 
wrote:
> Greetings.
>
> I would like to get opinions on various packages for email. 
> (Not trying to start flame wars, just wanting pros & cons and
> possibly alternatives...)
>
> Postfix vs. sendmail?

Generally you want postfix.

Sendmail is very old, it has a lot of cruft, and it's dog-slow.  
In the last formal benchmark of popular mailservers (which is 
admittedly old and a bit hard for me to find now), sendmail came 
in a miserable dead last for performance, whereas qmail and 
postfix were fairly neck-and-neck for the lead.

Mind you, sendmail has features like queue groups that many other 
mailservers lack.  But generally these are rarely used except 
for extremely exotic mail setups.

As for qmail, I'd like it more if I hadn't seen qmail servers 
spit my mail back at me for no good reason.  Mainly qmail 
doesn't seem to like the funny characters introduced by 
subaddressing.

> Which IMAP server is preferred?

Matter of taste, I suppose.  Usually it tends to come down to 
WU-IMAP, Courier, or Cyrus.  My preference is Cyrus--mainly 
because of the support of server-side SIEVE filtering scripts.  
Unfortunately, the SIEVE scripting language isn't terribly well 
documented, but I've found it handy all the same.

> Squirrelmail for web-based email?

Tends to be the default choice.  I've had little problem with it 
myself, and it's got a ton of handy plugins available.

> clamAV for anti-virus?

Might also try Sophos.  Non-free, I know, but perhaps it's worth 
looking into.

> We will also be running Spamassassin.

Good man.  You might get your mailserver on a few DNS-based RBLs 
as well; I favor ordb.org and spamhaus.org

--
Kelledin
"If a server crashes in a server farm and no one pings it, does 
it still cost four figures to fix?"