resend - need email server recommendation

[Craig White]

On Tue, 2006-02-28 at 10:55 -0700, Alex Dean wrote:
> On Feb 28, 2006, at 10:32 AM, Mike Garfias wrote:
> 
> > Also, I just thought of something.  Exim & Qmail are not exactly  
> > Sendmail
> > compatible.  If you have something on your system that calls  
> > sendmail (the
> > binary), Exim and Qmail may not work properly.  Postfix is Sendmail
> > compatible, and won't break things.
> 
> Qmail includes a 'sendmail' binary.  It's a wrapper that takes all  
> the sendmail arguments and passes them to qmail correctly.  You  
> symlink your normal sendmail location to this wrapper, and all is well.
> 
> > [alex at web1 alex]$ ls -l /usr/sbin/sendmail
> > lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root 23 Sep 12 18:14 /usr/sbin/sendmail -> /var/ 
> > qmail/bin/sendmail
> 
> Regarding qmail's complexity - I am nothing close to an email expert  
> and I have no doubt that qmail is more complex than I'm really aware  
> of.  But I was able to set it up to do exactly what I want with just  
> a few days of reading and tinkering.  (I did the whole process  
> several times just to be sure I knew what was going on.)  I beat my  
> head against Exim configuration for much longer and got nowhere, so  
> qmail was a very nice surprise.
----
I think that there are a lot of considerations for choosing which SMTP
server to use and probably one of the least important is how easy to
install.

I'm not sure that these are in order of most to least important but all
are considerations...

- modular construction, can implement features without recompiling the
whole enchilada

- implementation of methodologies prior to SMTP acceptance (much easier
to reject an email than to accept it and have to deal with getting rid
of it). Things like greylisting, helo checks, valid dns checks, rbl etc.

- implementation of delivery methodology to underlying IMAP/POP server
(I very much prefer virtual accounts rather than shell accounts and thus
sieve vs. procmail) Procmail is very much dependent upon users have a
home directory and a valid shell.

- implementation of wrappers for spamassassin, clamav, etc. (I
personally use MailScanner)

- ease of integration to other methodologies such as LDAP which I pretty
much use everywhere now - able to determine whether recipient is a valid
account 'prior' to accepting email without a lot of 'cost'

- ease of configuration

With postfix/sqlgrey/MailScanner/clamav/spamassassin, I have been able
to keep spam to an absolute minimum, while minimizing the the load on
the server and when I tie into a cyrus-imapd server with sieve and it's
auto create/auto sieve, etc. I can set up a new email account, have it's
default 'filters' pre-set and in place, automatically subscribe users to
pertinent mailboxes for IMAP and allow a user to easily change their
filters, set whitelists/blacklists etc. by themselves using
Horde/IMP/Ingo. I've got it so completely automated now, that when I
leave behind a setup using Webmin for the office manager, the office
manager can create a new account which automatically sets the mailbox,
folders, filters, subscriptions, samba account, roaming profile, home
directory, etc. - all in LDAP.

Craig