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