Gilbert Sebenste wrote:
On Mon, 23 Nov 2009, Ron Loftin wrote:
As others have already suggested, consider Postfix.
I'm putting in my $0.02(US) so I can add my experience when I first had a need for a decent MTA. I had used Sendmail in the past, but I didn't want to fight with the arcane syntax of the config files, and at that time the add-on management tools and scripts were not nearly as friendly to a beginner.
When Postfix was suggested to me, I started reading the docs on their Web site, and discovered that the learning curve is nowhere near as steep as it is with Sendmail. So far, Postfix has done everything I have needed, and with a LOT less pain.
As always, YMMV.
+1. Let me throw in something else. If youa re sending more than one email at a time (to more than one person simultaneously), Postfix will beat Sendmail. It can handle high loads better than Sendmail as well. Is it the fastest MTA out there? Doing some Google Fu some time ago, it's right there with the very fastest ones. For my job, I need to send out emergency notifications to 400 people at once. With Sendmail, that took over 7 minutes.
That doesn't make any sense unless you have a backed up queue with at least many thousands of messages - in which case you should tune sendmail to use multiple queue directories.
With Postfix, that takes seconds, and mostly because of the "handshaking" with the downstream host.
SMTP handshaking has to follow standards. The difference must really be in DNS lookup time. Sendmail does several more DNS lookups per delivery than postfix, but unless something is broken, DNS should be fast and certainly shouldn't account for 7 minutes on 400 messages.
If it's fast, I haven't even got time to send the message, get to a command prompt and type "mailq" and see it leaving the outbox queue...because it is already gone!
That should be the same for sendmail.