Hello,

From one distro to the next, I use the same sendmaili.cf since a lot of
time, and I remember that reading the doc and working with those .m4 files
was a real headache.

Jumping now to a recent distro and better (hmm...) distro, I thought I'll
find exim or postix as MTA, bacause I had read they were more secure and
easier to configure, especially for home usage.

I'm surprised that they are not part of the standard packages.
Any opinion about that ? Is it interessant to replace sendmail by one of
them ?

Thanks in advance,

--
^^ Gauthier
(_____/°°-ç
| \_`-"
)/@mmm||
\nn \nn FOE-Belgium : http://www.amisdelaterre.be

>
> I'm surprised that they are not part of the standard packages.
> Any opinion about that ? Is it interessant to replace sendmail by one
> of them ?
>

I'm using on the following at job and to a client:

Exim 4.x + PostgreSQL + Courier IMAP + Clam AV + Spam Assassin and they
are fiting just fine.

Exim have the easiest and human readable configuration file, IMHO. It's
simple, logical etc.

You can configure Exim with LDAP, PgSQL, MySQL, Oracle, Plain text
files. Information as: users, home directories, etc you can get from
them. It's very flexible and I like that the administrator can
configure a lot of things in humar readable options/actions.

More than that, you can use own "SELECT"s if you connect it to a
database. Ie:

address_data = ${lookup pgsql \
{SELECT username FROM users WHERE username='$local_part'
{$value}fail}

Even more, the manual have hundreds of pages and it's very well
structured.

Unfortunatly, I had to compile all the things by myself. But for me,
it's not a problem... :\

--
Claudiu Cismaru
**Network/System*Administrator
**RoEDU*Net*-*Tg-Jiu*POP

Gauthier schreef:
> Hello,
>
> From one distro to the next, I use the same sendmaili.cf since a lot of
> time, and I remember that reading the doc and working with those .m4 files
> was a real headache.
>
> Jumping now to a recent distro and better (hmm...) distro, I thought I'll
> find exim or postix as MTA, bacause I had read they were more secure and
> easier to configure, especially for home usage.
>
> I'm surprised that they are not part of the standard packages.
> Any opinion about that ? Is it interessant to replace sendmail by one of
> them ?
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
Well i do think postfix is "better" for home use. BUT... sendmail has
been there forever... Every linux/Unix box uses sendmail so if you can
configure sendmail on your slackbox you also can do it on a solaris
machine etc..

But if you don't care about that i would say remove sendmail and use
postfix. sendmail also had a lot of security bugs.. The reason why it's
not in slackware is i think:
- Sendmail just works fine if you know how
- postfix need not just a "package" but also need to reconfigure your
system (add users, groups, etc...)

Justin wrote:

> Gauthier schreef:
>
>> Hello,
>>
>> From one distro to the next, I use the same sendmaili.cf since a lot of
>> time, and I remember that reading the doc and working with those .m4
>> files
>> was a real headache.
>>
>> Jumping now to a recent distro and better (hmm...) distro, I thought I'll
>> find exim or postix as MTA, bacause I had read they were more secure and
>> easier to configure, especially for home usage.
>>
>> I'm surprised that they are not part of the standard packages.
>> Any opinion about that ? Is it interessant to replace sendmail by one of
>> them ?

Unless you're having a specific issue, or limitation, I see no reason to
switch. Of course, learning new things is always good, so if you want
to, well...I always thought the whole open source/linux thing was about
choice. So take a look, and see if there's something that could serve
you better.

>> Thanks in advance,
>>
> Well i do think postfix is "better" for home use. BUT... sendmail has
> been there forever...

Agreed. I also prefer postfix, as I just find it easier to work with.
Just a simple, personal preference, so that's in no way a comment on one
being better than another. I still try to keep sendmail somewhat fresh
in my head, since if you deal with Unix on a daily basis, you can't help
but run into it from time to time.

> Every linux/Unix box uses sendmail so if you can
> configure sendmail on your slackbox you also can do it on a solaris
> machine etc..

Not sure about this...I think Mandrake ( and maybe current versions of
RedHat ) use postfix by default. Probably others too. No idea if they
ship with more than one MTA.

>
> But if you don't care about that i would say remove sendmail and use
> postfix. sendmail also had a lot of security bugs.. The reason why it's
> not in slackware is i think:
> - Sendmail just works fine if you know how
> - postfix need not just a "package" but also need to reconfigure your
> system (add users, groups, etc...)

Depends on how you set it up. You can compile and configure postfix to
use existing users/groups to run, that's just not the default or
recommended way. At the same time, you can do the same thing with
sendmail. FreeBSD does some things with the default sendmail install
that are not exactly "standard"...Whatever that is. Again...Choice.


--
- Matt -