[TriLUG] Postfix v QMail ?

Jason White jason at jw2.org
Mon Jun 20 15:53:29 EDT 2005


* Tanner Lovelace (clubjuggler at gmail.com) [050617 19:33]:
> On 6/17/05, Craig Duncan <craigduncan at nc.rr.com> wrote:
> > Looking for some real world feedback on using these MTA's, whether one
> > has an advantage over the other, scales better, etc.

> I ran qmail on my mail server for about 3-4 years before switching
> to postfix which I've run now for also about 3-4 years.  I would
> *highly* recommend postfix over qmail.  The main reason I moved
> away from qmail was that it has basically stagnated.  The developer,
> Daniel Bernstein, has completely lost interest in it and to make it
> do anything that a normal MTA these days should do like 
> SMTP-AUTH, SSL, LDAP integration, etc.. you have to patch it.
> In addition to that, the patches often conflict with each other.
> To top all that off, if qmail isn't installed exactly where Mr. 
> Berstein decreed that it should be, it won't run.  So, I finally
> got completely fed up with the trouble of keeping it up to
> date and having to deal with a programmer that wanted to
> set policy on my system and chucked it out the window and
> went with postfix.  I've been much happier ever since.

I agree with Tanner on all these points, and I've *almost* switched to
Postfix for the same reasons.  However, I've been running qmail for 5
or 6 years, and it serves me well.   

It is somewhat annoying to patch qmail to get some features to work,
but there is a very helpful guide that makes it pretty easy:
http://www.qmailrocks.org/

Qmail and Postfix are both great MTA's, so as many others have
mentioned, you can't go wrong with either. One thing I like about
qmail is the "dash alias" feature.  If your email address is
joe at foo.com, qmail gives you a wildcard alias of joe-*@foo.com.  So,
when I go to Amazon and buy something, I sign up with
joe-amazon at foo.com, etc.  Makes it *really* easy to see where your
spam is coming from. Anyone know if this is easy to do with Postfix?

Jason




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