RE: Email Server
From: Louis Erickson (LErickson@ariba.com)Date: 08/16/02
- Previous message: Burton M. Strauss III: "RE: Wirless Bleeding - How to stop it?"
- Maybe in reply to: Chris Berry: "Email Server"
- Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] [ attachment ]
From: Louis Erickson <LErickson@ariba.com> To: "'Chris Berry'" <compjma@hotmail.com> Date: Fri, 16 Aug 2002 09:42:43 -0700
Chris,
Several others have discussed Postfix, QMail, and Sendmail, so I thought I'd
put in a good word for Exim.
I've used smail, sendmail and exim through the years, and I've been happiest
with exim.
I've heard great things about postfix, but I couldn't get it configured
properly for my environment, and the documentation left me baffled.
Last I checked, smail was getting pretty outdated and had some significant
quirks. Exim was written to work "like smail" so if you were going to
consider smail, consider exim instead.
I haven't had a chance to work with Courier, although I installed it to
review it. I found it's sealed-server model strange and that it broke a
number of my unix-savvy power users. I did not find it easy to build,
install or configure, although I did get it working on my test machine.
I've also used sendmail, and think that it's a terrible tool, unless you
need the ridiculous amounts of power and flexibility it offers. Mostly I
think that because I've never been able to get it to configure the way they
say you should be able to, and have been forced to dig in to its byzantine
and confusing configuration file by hand rather than with the configuration
tools provided. I ran a hand-hacked sendmail.cf for years to properly get
my pop-before-smtp working properly. Sendmail does have the advantage of
being pretty much the standard; it's easy to get help or consulting on and
it's well-known.
Exim has worked very well for me. It's well documented and quite flexible.
I've been able to make it do pretty much everything I wanted in a
straightforward way. It has excellent documentation on the web, and builds
and installs easily. I've been able to get it to do pop-before-smtp, and to
support SpamAssassin (filter spam! Woohoo!) and even to make it understand
"+" in email addresses the way mailers ought to. The configuration file is
a little unusual, and you really have to stop and understand the method
behind it before you can configure it adeptly. I managed to get it
validating out of LDAP with just configuration file changes, but it was
tricky. You can use Perl and regular expressions sensibly in the
configuration file, if you know those tools.
One note: The Exim book from O'reilly covers the now-outdated Exim 3,
instead of Exim 4. There's some interesting and notable changes between the
two, although the book is still somewhat useful.
Generally, any of these tools are going to have warts, and you'll find
people with good experiences and horror stories for each of them. Pick the
one you're most comfortable with for whatever reason, even if it's you just
kind of like it or that you've got a buddy who likes it.
Unfortunately, I can't speak to ease of configuring. I consider 'vi' to be
the best tool for system administration, and usually don't use others. I do
think Exim had some of the best documentation, and was easiest to actually
understand, but that likely varies from person to person.
Hope you found my random babbling helpful.
Lou Erickson
IT Tools Developer,
Ariba, Inc.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Chris Berry [mailto:compjma@hotmail.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, August 13, 2002 5:55 PM
> To: security-basics@securityfocus.com
> Subject: Email Server
>
>
>
>
> I'm looking at installing a linux based email server in
> our network.
> (was going to get exchange because we're mostly a microsoft
> shop, but as
> usual, no budget available. Working on the microsoft thing,
> finally got
> OpenOffice working, and I'm looking at WINE next.) Now that
> I've been
> looking at some of the options, I'm impressed with the available
> features. I started out by trying to find all of the available email
> programs (MTA's to be precise) and came up with this list:
> Courier, Exim,
> Zmailer, Smail3, Porcupine, Sendmail, Qmail, and Postfix
> I've done some
> research and it appears that the vast majority of people use
> Sendmail,
> Exim, Qmail, and Postfix. I'm light on linux knowledge
> (although my last
> project, the dhcp aware router is now working well) so having some
> community support is definitely important. Sendmail use seems to be
> declining because of security issues, and it looks like the
> best choice
> would be either Qmail or Postfix, but I'd like to get some
> imput if anyone
> out there has an opinion or some advice. What do you think I
> should use,
> and why?
> Our basic criteria is that it should a)Have a reasonable admin
> interface (if you think vi is the best thing since sliced
> bread you're
> probably not on the same wavelength as me), b)Secure, c)Good
> at blocking
> spam (either by itself or with add-ons), d)Open source for
> cost reasons, e)
> Relatively fast. In addition it looked like pretty much everyone was
> using procmail for their LDA, anything else I should be considering?
> I'm going to be building a dmz to put this thing in,
> besides patching
> the OS and programs I'll be using, turning off unused
> daemons, is there
> any particular thing I should do to keep from getting rooted
> six ways from
> sunday while I'm learning?
>
- Previous message: Burton M. Strauss III: "RE: Wirless Bleeding - How to stop it?"
- Maybe in reply to: Chris Berry: "Email Server"
- Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] [ attachment ]
Relevant Pages
|
|
