apt confusion

[Kurt Granroth]

On Sep 15, 2005, at 1:24 PM, Alex Dean wrote:
> Interesting.  Are you referring to qMail pop server or qMail MTA?   
> Care to elaborate as to why?

The qmail fatal flaw, in my mind, has nothing to do with its features  
or configuration or the like.  It's flaw, rather, can be expressed in  
three letters: DJB.  As in, Dan J. Bernstein, the author of qmail.   
He is undoubtedly a brilliant programmer but as with a few of the  
brightest, his ego has a habit of getting in the way of his coding.   
The two most commonly quoted examples are his refusal to allow easy  
binary packaging of qmail and his refusal to accept a number of  
essential patches.

More subtly, though, is the affect on the qmail community.  I  
abandoned qmail some years ago so I don't know if it's changed since  
then, but back then, there was always an air of frustration  
permeating the community.  DJB himself was very prickly and when  
other people would answer questions, they often had to apologize for  
either his attitude or his refusal to allow various things to happen.

If you don't care about any of that and just want a powerful mail  
server, then qmail is certainly a valid choice.  Nobody questions its  
power or fundamental security.  I just didn't think it was worth it  
when there was two other very good sendmail alternatives with vibrant  
and helpful communities: exim and postfix

> You could still talk me out of qMail, but I think I definitely want  
> to get away from exim.  Trying to configure it was a PITA, and  
> posting questions here about it didn't draw much response.

I never had problems with exim when I tried it but that was typically  
on systems where I didn't have any complex requirements.  Set up a  
smart relay and that was it.  Most of the complex setups (virtual  
domains, tls, auth, etc) were done with postfix.  I highly recommend  
postfix.  Very easy to setup and far more powerful than I ever needed  
it to be.  Plus, there are a lot of very helpful postfix users, so  
that's a plus.

One more thing on exim, though: you might try asking any exim  
questions on a debian community resource (lists, forums, etc).  I  
believe exim is still the default on debian and debian users are  
typically very good at tutorials and one-on-one help, in my experience.