postfix or exim

[Preston Kutzner]

On May 9, 2009, at 5:05 PM, Noah wrote:

> Hi there,
>
> I am hoping to set up an ubuntu box for handling mail.  What is the  
> Best
> MTA - exim or postfix?  Is there some pages that can explain the
> differences?


I personally prefer to use Postfix.  It is easy to configure (IMO) and  
there is a good amount of documentation available for it.  The  
configuration files are well-documented and it is a secure and fast  
MUA.  I did find this side-by-side comparison page on the Intarwebs;  
do note, however that it is from 2003 so some of these facts may have  
changed by this point:  http://www.geocities.com/mailsoftware42/

As far as some of the things on the list are concerned, it is true  
that Postfix doesn't have built-in integration with IMAP/POP, it hands  
those responsibilities off to other daemons like Dovecot, UW, or  
Cyrus.  Postfix's philosophy seems to follow the UNIX philosophy of  
doing one thing, but doing it very well.  Post fix does one thing,  
SMTP, but it does it very well, and is easy to configure.  With  
regards to quotas, the list says it's possible with a patch for  
Postfix.  While this is true to get Postfix specifically to support  
quotas, it is possible to use quotas if you set up Postfix to use  
Dovecot as it's mail delivery back-end.  I do have a system set up  
like this, and it does work well.  Unfortunately, documentation is a  
little hard to come by to get Postfix set-up with SASL and Dovecot and  
virtual domains/mailboxes.

If you're looking for ease-of config for Postfix and are wanting to  
use virtual domains/mailboxes, you could check out the postfixadmin  
package.  It's a php front-end to administering virtual domains/ 
mailboxes in Postfix.
-- 
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