On Mon, March 11, 2013 04:52, Tilman Schmidt wrote:
Am 11.03.2013 03:54, schrieb Austin Einter:
I am planning to setup mail server for my domain.
Which one is preferred postfix or sendmail.
Postfix.
I have been running Sendmail from version 8.6 in 1995 on HP-UX 9.02 to 8.13 at the present on CentOS-5.9 as these were the default MTA's shipped by the vendor. When RHEL-6 switched from Sendmail to Postfix I decided to bite the bullet and change my public MX servers to Postfix as and when I upgraded them to CentOS-6. This was not without difficulty and unhappiness, for I miss the command line email trace facility that Sendmail provides out of the box, but it was not traumatic either.
The main benefit to using Postfix over Sendmail is that Postfix definitely places a lower intellectual load on its administrators. For that reason alone I would recommend it over Sendmail. While M4 macros take most of the arcana out of Sendmail's configuration files they are no where near as easy to understand as Postfix's simple config files.
The only 'rule' I have to suggest is:
The mail server host and all of its MX records must resolve to a DNS 'A" or 'AAAA' record. Do not use CNAME records with any MX host or you will learn why not to do this the hard way.
On 03/11/2013 09:27 AM, James B. Byrne wrote:
On Mon, March 11, 2013 04:52, Tilman Schmidt wrote:
Am 11.03.2013 03:54, schrieb Austin Einter:
I am planning to setup mail server for my domain.
Which one is preferred postfix or sendmail.
Postfix.
I have been running Sendmail from version 8.6 in 1995 on HP-UX 9.02 to 8.13 at the present on CentOS-5.9 as these were the default MTA's shipped by the vendor. When RHEL-6 switched from Sendmail to Postfix I decided to bite the bullet and change my public MX servers to Postfix as and when I upgraded them to CentOS-6. This was not without difficulty and unhappiness, for I miss the command line email trace facility that Sendmail provides out of the box, but it was not traumatic either.
The main benefit to using Postfix over Sendmail is that Postfix definitely places a lower intellectual load on its administrators. For that reason alone I would recommend it over Sendmail. While M4 macros take most of the arcana out of Sendmail's configuration files they are no where near as easy to understand as Postfix's simple config files.
I would further add, don't manually edit your main.cf, learn the postconf command. It is easier to keep track of changes as you make them, and put them back to default. Too many of the howtos provide THEIR main.cf and you have no easy way of telling what they changed. master.cf is harder to maintain; for the most part, you can just append what you need to the end, rather then add in place.
The only 'rule' I have to suggest is:
The mail server host and all of its MX records must resolve to a DNS 'A" or 'AAAA' record. Do not use CNAME records with any MX host or you will learn why not to do this the hard way.
No, no. He has to learn the the hard way like the rest of us did! Or at least those that did it before Liu came out with his book...
On Mar 11, 2013, at 10:34 AM, Robert Moskowitz wrote:
On 03/11/2013 09:27 AM, James B. Byrne wrote:
On Mon, March 11, 2013 04:52, Tilman Schmidt wrote:
Am 11.03.2013 03:54, schrieb Austin Einter:
I am planning to setup mail server for my domain.
Which one is preferred postfix or sendmail.
Postfix.
I have been running Sendmail from version 8.6 in 1995 on HP-UX 9.02 to 8.13 at the present on CentOS-5.9 as these were the default MTA's shipped by the vendor. When RHEL-6 switched from Sendmail to Postfix I decided to bite the bullet and change my public MX servers to Postfix as and when I upgraded them to CentOS-6. This was not without difficulty and unhappiness, for I miss the command line email trace facility that Sendmail provides out of the box, but it was not traumatic either.
The main benefit to using Postfix over Sendmail is that Postfix definitely places a lower intellectual load on its administrators. For that reason alone I would recommend it over Sendmail. While M4 macros take most of the arcana out of Sendmail's configuration files they are no where near as easy to understand as Postfix's simple config files.
I would further add, don't manually edit your main.cf, learn the postconf command. It is easier to keep track of changes as you make them, and put them back to default. Too many of the howtos provide THEIR main.cf and you have no easy way of telling what they changed. master.cf is harder to maintain; for the most part, you can just append what you need to the end, rather then add in place.
---- develop good, consistent habits… postfix or whatever config files you edit, backup the distribution's version of the config file first before you ever edit…
cp main.cf main.cf-dist
with postfix, after a while, the comments seem rather pointless and add too much cruft. Also, similar to samba and the testparam command, you can do something like (from memory) 'postconf -n' to get all the values (explicit and default) and you can even do 'postconf -n > main.cf' to have a config file with all values and no comments. YMMV
To the OP specifically, Sendmail and Postfix accomplish the same tasks. Postfix has good documentation, a very good mail list and a reasonably straightforward language to configure items. Sendmail has a lot of history, paid support if you need it but a fairly arcane language and methodology for configuring it. It's not that Sendmail is bad, it's just so 90's.
I found things like setting up SMTPS and LDAP virtual users to be infinitely easier and quicker on Postfix.
Craig
On Mon, Mar 11, 2013 at 8:27 AM, James B. Byrne byrnejb@harte-lyne.ca wrote:
The main benefit to using Postfix over Sendmail is that Postfix definitely places a lower intellectual load on its administrators. For that reason alone I would recommend it over Sendmail. While M4 macros take most of the arcana out of Sendmail's configuration files they are no where near as easy to understand as Postfix's simple config files.
On the other hand, if you do 'normal' things with sendmail, all you have to do is tweak a few values in the provided sendmail.mc and restart to rebuild the configs, and if you do anything unusual you can drop in MimeDefang as a milter and gain complete control of all of the internal steps in a small snippet of perl. Personally, I think the introduction of the milter interface years ago fixed all of the old issues with sendmail. I think postfix can use MimeDefang these days too, but it took it much longer to make it usable.
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Craig White -
James B. Byrne -
Les Mikesell -
Robert Moskowitz