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From: john@pacer.nlc.net.au (John Saunders)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.sendmail,comp.mail.smail,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: Sendmail vs. Smail...
Followup-To: comp.mail.sendmail,comp.mail.smail,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Date: 8 Dec 1996 22:27:51 GMT
Organization: Pacer - Linux box at home
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References: <57tf61$gq7@raven.eva.net> <584aao$5im@rzstud1.rz.uni-karlsruhe.de> <vusp5k6iy2.fsf@moocow.math.nat.tu-bs.de> <589e5u$35t@stdismas.bogon.com> <589jsm$o2v@ezekiel.eunet.ie> <589s2i$aro@raven.eva.net>
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J.C. Archambeau (jca@bighorn.accessnv.com) wrote:
> Nick Hilliard (nick@eunet.ie) wrote:
> :: Then why don't you look at exim. It really has the best of both worlds.
> :: Human readably config files, and much more flexibility than smail. How
>
> : ... but retains smail's poor queueing strategy and lack of header rewriting
> : capabilities :-(
I used to re-write the From: header using smail. I don't know how it compares
with sendmail, but it seemed easy enough to do.
> : Nick, in search of the perfect mail relay system
>
> What have been your findings so far? I have received an e-mail
> recommendation for qmail which is fast, but I don't how about its
> security and filtering features. I am willing to hand off the filtering
> to procmail and elm.
Qmail has very good security, root privs are only used when needed, at all
other times it runs with an un-trusted user id. It's also very safe with
regards to queueing messages to disk, qmail always queues messages to disk
and will only declare success to the sender once this has been done. You
can kill qmail at any time and re-start it and be assured that no messages
will go missing. Qmail also has it's own filtering capability, but it's not
as powerful as procmail in that it's not easy to filter on the contents of
any header. However it's very easy to make qmail pass all messages through
procmail for delivery.
Qmail can also prevent spammers using your site as an SMTP relay. It's
also possible to list a bunch of spammer domains you don't want to get
email from and bounce them. It also has list management features as
standard so for a small list you won't need majordomo or anything else.
The one weakness of qmail is header re-writing. It's possible to make it do
it, but you need to supply a program (or script) that makes the actual
change to the message. Qmail simply provides diverting capability so that
the message gets passed via your re-writing program. It's other weakness
(IMHO) is that when a message has multiple recipients at the same host,
qmail sends each recipient their own message rather than using a single
message for both. The Qmail author says that in practice this scenario is
very rare, also for a link with lots of BW and a slow round trip time it's
faster to send 2 messages at the same time than 1 message with an extra
receipient.
Cheers.
-- +------------------------------------------------------------+
. | John Saunders - john@pacer.nlc.net.au (Home) |
,--_|\ | - johns@rd.scitec.com.au (Work) |
/ Oz \ | - http://www.nlc.net.au/~john/ (WWW) |
\_,--\_/ | "Better to keep your mouth closed and be thought a fool, |
v | than to open it and remove any doubt" - Homer Simpson. |
+------------------------------------------------------------+