[CentOS] Postfix vs Sendmail

[David G. Miller]

Harold Pritchett <harold at ...> writes:

> 
> On 11/2/2013 8:57 AM, 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.)
<SNIP>
> > 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.
> >
> > Am I alone in this view?
> 
> Not at all.  Selection of a mail agent borders on a religious topic.  I
personally am a devout sendmail admin.  I
> have been running sendmail since I was the sysadmin of a network 
> of sun4 pizza boxes back in the 1980's.  I even met Eric Allman at a
USENIX conference once.  I've have given
> sessions on installing and configuring sendmail at national and 
> international conferences.  I once installed sendmail on an IBM Mainframe
running Redhat Linux.
> 
<SNIP>
> Let's not get into a religious shouting match here.  You know, the my
software is better than yours kind of
> thing.  Pick what you are comfortable with and run it.  They all do 
> basically the same thing, just in different ways.
> 
> Harold
> 
Oh, come on.  We haven't had a good religious flame war on the list in a
while.  I'm sure we can even go off topic and debate vi vs. emacs, which is
the best shell, etc.

Back to the original question... I've never found sendmail that difficult
and have been running it as my MTA for years.  My take is that sendmail lets
you do almost anything you could possibly want to do with an MTA and the
configuration supports that but most people just want a simple e-mail sender
and receiver and it's not at all hard to set up to do that.  I think I only
have to change/set about half a dozen lines in sendmail.mc to configure a
minimal installation and only a few more to have it use some DNS blacklists
and spam assassin.

Cheers,
Dave