Setup Help needed - SSL, Mail Server

[David Mandala]

Sendmail is a nightmare to configure, is so large it is just this side
of impossible to audit so the security status is unknown and will remain
unknown.

Qmail, is fairly easy to configure, somewhat hard to build correctly
since you really need to add quite a few patches to the original source
code. Fairly easy to audit and is know to be secure, in fact it has
never had a security issue yet.

Postfix, is easy to configure, not hard to install or build from source,
comes with Red Hat 7.3 and can be turned on by a script called
redhat-switchmail which will allow you to switch to postfix simply. It
currently has no know security issues and is small enough to audit.

Given sendmail's long history of problems I would go with qmail or
postfix, in fact I run postfix now, I used to run qmail but got tired of
having to patch it to get the configuration I wanted.

Cheers,

Davidm

On Mon, 2002-08-19 at 17:10, Tom Emerson wrote:
> So many negative replies regarding Sendmail.  Anybody care to elaborate
> regarding the current state of Sendmail V. anything/everything else?
> 
> Just to be the devil's advocate, why do I need to pursue something other
> than Sendmail for my RedHat 7.3?  On RH, Sendmail is ready to go, (except
> for the neccessity of a couple of tweeks let Sendmail know it's OK to
> accept email from the Internet, and the addition of your favorite
> anti-spam blacklist server or servers).
> 
> Looking for Pros, Cons, anti-spam DB connectivity, restricted shell
> capailities & other security issues, out-of-the-box ready to use issues,
> multiple domains, multiple identical user acounts, ease of third
> party software's use of the server, etc...
> 
> I've used/implemented many flavors of mail servers over the past few
> years, have to admit that in one form or another I've been stung by most
> of them, whether Sendmail, QMail, Postfix, whatever.  Seems these three
> have matured somewhat, and are fairly easy to roll into production these
> days.
> 
>  - t
> ----------
> 
> 
> 
> On Mon, 19 Aug 2002, Kurt Granroth wrote:
> 
> On Monday 19 August 2002 12:46 pm, Mike Starke wrote:
> > Mail
> > I'm not a big fan of sendmail; I'm certain most of the group will
> > steer you towards Postfix or Qmail. Personally, I am a Qmail fan.
> > Again, commit to one of them, and we can certainly guide you thru
> > getting it operational.
> 
> I second the "stay away from sendmail" sentiment and I agree that Qmail is 
> nice.  I'd also like to add my support for 'exim', though.  I used to use 
> qmail pretty consistently (and it is very nice) but since moving my mail 
> server system to Debian, I've been using exim (woody's default).  It was 
> very easy to configure and had worked flawlessly.  It has built in support 
> for open relay blacklists (I use ordb.org) and can natively use Maildir 
> (like qmail).  Plugging SpamAssassin into exim was also very easy (if not 
> trivial).  And 'eximstats' rocks.
> 
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-- 
David IS Mandala
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