postfix or exim

[Marius Gedminas]

On Mon, May 11, 2009 at 11:57:40AM -0500, Preston Kutzner wrote:
> On May 11, 2009, at 11:19 AM, Marius Gedminas wrote:
> 
> > On Sat, May 09, 2009 at 03:05:37PM -0700, Noah wrote:
> >> 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?
> >
> > "The Best MTA" is a religious question.
> >
> > Postfix is the default recommended MTA on Ubuntu systems, as far as I
> > understand, from quotes like this:
> >
> >    Postfix is the default Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) in Ubuntu.
> >            -- https://help.ubuntu.com/8.04/serverguide/C/postfix.html
> >
> > I use it, I like it.
> 
> The strange thing is that exim is usually installed by default, and  
> usually installed as the MTA when packages are installed that require  
> an MTA.  A good example of this is mailx.

Not any more, apparently:

  $ apt-cache show mailx|grep Depends
  Depends: bsd-mailx
  $ apt-cache show bsd-mailx|grep Depends
  Depends: libc6 (>= 2.8), liblockfile1 (>= 1.0), postfix | mail-transport-agent, base-files (>= 2.2.0)

It pulls in postfix by default in Jaunty.

> On a fresh system, if you  
> install the package mailx, it will automatically install exim for  
> you.  However, if you already have postfix installed or are installing  
> it at the same time as you install mailx, it will not install exim.  I  
> still wonder why Ubuntu installs exim as the default if no other MTA  
> is already installed.

In Debian exim is the official recommended MTA.  It's possible that
Ubuntu's mailx used to inherit that behaviour from Debian before someone
noticed and fixed that.

Marius Gedminas
-- 
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