[CentOS] Use postfix and spamd on CentOS 6 - looking for a shortest guide

[Valeri Galtsev]

On Wed, August 13, 2014 11:50 am, Always Learning wrote:
>
> On Wed, 2014-08-13 at 18:32 +0200, Timothy Murphy wrote:
>> If I had to read a book in order to install and configure postfix I
would go back to sendmail.
>
> No one really wants to revert to Sendmail - do they ?
>
Sendmail exists forever. Postfix emerged a bit later, and postfix was
written with security in mind. In case of sendmail on [huge] binary does
everything, including listening to external port. There are quite likely
multible bugs in large code. In case of postfix it is tiny piece of code
(so there is virtually impossible to introduce bug into it) that listens
to external ports. I was extremely happy to switch away from sendmail to
postfix (and postfix configuration files are human readable!).

Usually postfix comes more or less decently configured as a trivial mail
server (both in case of CentOS rpm, and from postfix vendor if you
download tarball and build it yourself - I probably should mention the
author: Vietse Venema), you will need to make postfix listen to external
connections though in main.cf. I can not compare postfix to exim, I never
used exim.

Building decent mail server with good spam filtering is different story,
and requires some system administration knowledge. That is the reason for
long replies that didn't appeal to you. RHEL is not there yet to claim as
M$ does that you just get their product, few clicks and you have
enterprise level [whichever service] and all auto-magically will work
[thanks to RHEL and/or M$ great product]. They (RH) may be aiming to have
it that way. If they succeed, anybody without special knowledge will be
able to set up great Linux server, I guess. But, as I've heard once: "if
even an idiot can use something only an idiot will use it". We'll see ;-)

Valeri

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Valeri Galtsev
Sr System Administrator
Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics
Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics
University of Chicago
Phone: 773-702-4247
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