Sendmail replacements?

Thu Feb 13 09:49:50 PST 2003

Rich,

There is Qmail and there is POstfix.

Qmail is older.  It is written by the iconoclast mathematician djb.  It
prides itself on being gratuituously different.  No, really!  It prefers
to live in, of all places, /var/qmail!  Whee!  And instead of normal
config files, there's a directory, with one file holding a value for
each configuration directive.  Ah, and .forward files are passe, it is
all about .qmail, and forwarding addresses technically should be
preceded by an &.

For all this, Qmail is very cool because it is a bunch of paranoid
little daemons with limited privs talking to each other.  It performs
very well, and is extremely secure.

Then Wietse came along.  He wrote Postfix.  Postfix is shaped very much
like Qmail, only it takes pains to be user-friendly.  It honors
Sendmail's .forward files, for example, and a lot of conventions with,
say, "virtual user tables" while throwing out the whole sendmail.cf
monstrosity in favor of TWO, count them, TWO system configuration files.
The one you expect to edit is highly commented, and comes with a whole
set of example config files for particular purposes.

Postfix is awesome, though, because of its architecture, it sometimes
has certain limitations that I can't recall.  Maybe it is ETRN for a
single domain doesn't work, or at one time, did not work.  And there
used to be limitations on how much address rewriting and header munging
it could do in one pass, only because the config file syntax is not
completely extensible like Sendmail's, and Wietse hadn't implemented
every last bizzaro feature that the people wanted.

But I haven't implemented a Postfix install in awhile.  In fact, 
I haven't implemented much of anything in awhile.  Does anyone want me
to implement something for them?  My resume is at
http://meat.net/~dannyman/resume.html. :)  Thanks for tolerating my
self-promotion.

-danny

-- 
http://dannyman.toldme.com/