On Sun, Dec 2, 2012 at 6:52 PM, Harold Pritchett harold@uga.edu wrote:
On 12/2/2012 6:08 PM, John R Pierce wrote:
On 12/2/2012 2:46 PM, Tilman Schmidt wrote:
Not a good advice for someone who already has some experience with Sendmail but none with Postfix. He'll have to read docs either way, but staying with Sendmail spares him the effort of reinstallation (including probable breakage of his running installation), and reading the docs of a familiar product (Sendmail) is much easier than reading the docs of an unfamiliar one (Postfix).
except he doesn't have a working configuration with sendmail and is apparently a novice, so the postfix recommendation is, IMHO, a good one.
Why? Once upon a time, many years ago, I tried postfix. I ended up removing it and installing sendmail. I've been using sendmail since the early 1980's, when we were running the Eric Allman code from UCB on a VAX 780 under BCD Unix. And, yes, I recognize this as a religious topic and I'm not trying to start a flame war. Why, in your opinion, is postfix superior to sendmail.
Harold (who's first linux system was slackware 1.0)
You were probably more comfortable running sendmail because you had a long history of using it. I once tried to give emacs a fair shake, but since I had already used vi for a long time, I didn't like it. I'm honest enough to say that it was mostly because I was comfortable with vi, and not that there's anything wrong with emacs [1].
Conceptually, the fact that sendmail requires a makefile and a bunch of macros just to generate the configuration pretty clearly points to *something* being wrong, or at least anachronistic, with the design. Objectively, it performs all of its tasks within the same process, adding significantly to potential security issues.
Postfix uses simple name=value syntax but can still get as complex as you need, if you do. It also segregates functions into different processes, isolating areas that might pose higher security risks.
❧ Brian Mathis
[1] This is just an anecdote. Please for the love of Linus do not reply to the vi vs emacs statement.