> sendmail - No longer the security nightmare it used to be, but it is > the slower of the bunch. are we talking about sendmail X? ;) > > postfix - The easiest to configure. Has enough features and speed > to keep most people happy. hmm...i don't know...qmail appears to me to be the easiest of them all due to its utter simplicity (and lack of features/necessary behavior) > > exim - Fast and powerful. Lots of features and highly configurable. > But ONLY if you know very well what you are going. Not as > hard as sendmail to configure (think sendmail.cf), but > much harder than postfix. Expecially recomended for people > (like me) that enjoy micromanaging and customizing every > small detail. ACL features are a god given. I must take a look at exim one of these days. > > qmail - (Take with a grain of salt, since I dislike dbj) A pain. > It is fast and secure, as long as you use the stock > package. But you will need to include several external > packages to get even basic functionality, and everything > about it (except SMTP protocol itself) is non standard, > and the configuration is spread between a lot of files > and directories. But it really is fast (slightly faster > than exim in some cases, about the same in others). You could run qmail-smtpd out of xinetd...and run qmail without daemontools and log to syslog. But if you are into djb's stuff you do end up using the rest of his good stuff. > > As you can see, I use Exim so, again, take another grain of salt. > My current exim setup is, as far as I know, impossible to reproduce > with any other MTA, unless you use several external hacks (multiple > instances with different configurations, with port redirection, to > name just one). When you say multiple instances, I assume multiple queues too? > > But most of the time, when recomending a MTA to others, I say > postfix. > :D - qmail not suitable for today's Internet as an MX mta without patching and sendmail a pain to learn/understand if you are not familiar with m4