[CentOS] Postfix setup
Craig White
craig.white at ttiltd.com
Mon Mar 11 20:56:03 UTC 2013
On Mar 11, 2013, at 10:34 AM, Robert Moskowitz wrote:
>
> On 03/11/2013 09:27 AM, James B. Byrne wrote:
>> On Mon, March 11, 2013 04:52, Tilman Schmidt wrote:
>>> Am 11.03.2013 03:54, schrieb Austin Einter:
>>>> I am planning to setup mail server for my domain.
>>>>
>>>> Which one is preferred postfix or sendmail.
>> Postfix.
>>
>> I have been running Sendmail from version 8.6 in 1995 on HP-UX 9.02 to
>> 8.13 at the present on CentOS-5.9 as these were the default MTA's
>> shipped by the vendor. When RHEL-6 switched from Sendmail to Postfix
>> I decided to bite the bullet and change my public MX servers to
>> Postfix as and when I upgraded them to CentOS-6. This was not without
>> difficulty and unhappiness, for I miss the command line email trace
>> facility that Sendmail provides out of the box, but it was not
>> traumatic either.
>>
>> The main benefit to using Postfix over Sendmail is that Postfix
>> definitely places a lower intellectual load on its administrators.
>> For that reason alone I would recommend it over Sendmail. While M4
>> macros take most of the arcana out of Sendmail's configuration files
>> they are no where near as easy to understand as Postfix's simple
>> config files.
>
> I would further add, don't manually edit your main.cf, learn the
> postconf command. It is easier to keep track of changes as you make
> them, and put them back to default. Too many of the howtos provide THEIR
> main.cf and you have no easy way of telling what they changed.
> master.cf is harder to maintain; for the most part, you can just append
> what you need to the end, rather then add in place.
----
develop good, consistent habits… postfix or whatever config files you edit, backup the distribution's version of the config file first before you ever edit…
cp main.cf main.cf-dist
with postfix, after a while, the comments seem rather pointless and add too much cruft. Also, similar to samba and the testparam command, you can do something like (from memory) 'postconf -n' to get all the values (explicit and default) and you can even do 'postconf -n > main.cf' to have a config file with all values and no comments. YMMV
To the OP specifically, Sendmail and Postfix accomplish the same tasks. Postfix has good documentation, a very good mail list and a reasonably straightforward language to configure items. Sendmail has a lot of history, paid support if you need it but a fairly arcane language and methodology for configuring it. It's not that Sendmail is bad, it's just so 90's.
I found things like setting up SMTPS and LDAP virtual users to be infinitely easier and quicker on Postfix.
Craig
More information about the CentOS
mailing list