Chan Chung Hang Christopher wrote:
Rudi Ahlers wrote:
Can anyone, who has used both Postfix & Exim please share some experience with me? Which of these 2 did you prefer to use, and why?
I have not used exim but I know someone who swears by it. It is highly configurable and had stuff like sender based routing before postfix did.
cPanel uses Exim (and AFAIK, only Exim), VirtualMin seems to use Postfix by default and often times when a custom server is installed a client doesn't know which to use so we recommend Exim. But, what are the differences between these 2, from your experience, if you don't mind telling me?
Exim is monolithic while postfix is not. Next up would be a comparison in feature sets (lookup table should be the same - mysql,pgsql,ldap,Berkerly DB) but is probably not worth it unless you want to do make some really intricate ruleset. The last would probably be the difference in behaviour and therefore in tuning. postfix being non-monolithic might mean that it has more room for fine-tuning than exim.
I've never found it particularly necessary to tune exim, out of the box with a basic configuration it handles itself very well and scales nicely even up to heavy loads. I've used it in 100k+ e-mails a day environments without any stability or performance problems. It's a rather popular mail server in the UK, possibly by nature of it's origins at Cambridge.
I've not spent much time using postfix, but every time I have it's been relatively straightforward and intuitive as well. Always seems to perform well too :)
I rather feel its a bit of a case of 6 of one, half a dozen of the other. Both tackle the same problem from slightly different angles, and both have achieved excellence in their own ways.
There is a great introduction to configuring exim on this site: http://www.exim-new-users.co.uk
Paul