[CentOS] Postfix vs Sendmail

[Ned Slider]

On 02/11/13 12:57, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> I have two CentOS-6.4 servers, in different places.
> I am running postfix/amavis on one, and sendmail/procmail on the other.
> I don't recall having any difficulty setting up sendmail many years ago
> using sendmail.mc .
> But I found postfix very complicated to setup last year.
> (It's working fine now.)
>
> I recall that when I asked for advice
> one person advised me to read 2 books on postfix,
> and another advised me to pay someone to set it up.
>

Which is good advice. Setting up a mail server is a specialist task and 
you should expect to do some reading around the subject if you have not 
done it before or are new to Postfix.

> I asked why postfix was preferable, but didn't any convincing reply.
> The general response was along the lines that it was the "modern" way.
>

I think you are probably asking the wrong people. Red Hat made Postfix 
the default MTA in RHEL6 and that alone should be reason enough to go 
with it IMHO unless you have a specific reason to prefer sendmail or 
something else. I think you would need to address your question to Red Hat.

> Having looked into postfix/amavis a little further,
> it seems to me to involve excessively complicated processes
> (at least for a simple home server)
> with email going along spaghetti-like routes.
>

It's also very flexible which makes it immensely powerful. If all you 
want to do is accept mail and deliver it then you don't need amavisd-new 
and can run a simple MTA setup.

> Am I alone in this view?
>

Probably not by a long shot. I would guess there are many sendmail 
admins out there who have been running their sendmail servers for a very 
long time and have no intentions of learning something new.

Personally, when I wanted to learn to set up and run a mail server I 
looked at both sendmail and Postfix and concluded that IMHO the Postfix 
configs seemed more logical and thus easier to learn to me. I don't 
expect that to be true for everyone and choice is a wonderful thing :-)