This is part of The Pile, a partial archive of some open source mailing lists and newsgroups.
Date: Tue, 6 Feb 2001 21:19:32 -0800 (PST) From: "Dagmar d'Surreal" <dagmar@dsurreal.org> To: J C Lawrence <claw@kanga.nu> Subject: Re: [svlug] non-religious? count me in! On Tue, 6 Feb 2001, J C Lawrence wrote: > On Tue, 6 Feb 2001 12:13:04 -0800 > Chris Waters <xtifr@dsp.net> wrote: > > > I can suggest an MTA that seems to be fairly religion-free (at > > least so far): Postfix. Its origins in a big faceless company > > (IBM) seem to have kept the worst of the woo-wahs at bay. Of > > course, if you're not interested in switching for other reasons, > > that's fine, but I just thought I'd throw it out. > > I'd rate Wietse's downplayed character as significanly here. While > not similar, Eric and David are not exactly quiet unobtrusive types. > Exim, a not-so-indirect product of Cambridge University, seems to > occupy a similarly moderate population among MTA users. Nice > product too -- I'm very happily using it on precisely half my boxes > (the rest are postfix). I've heard good things about Exim. I won't use PostFix primarily because when it first came out, they made a BIG stink about how much all the other mailers sucked, and how theirs was clearly superior all the rest, and how they hadn't made any of the mistakes other people did. ...then the nice folks on Bugtraq proceeded to rip them a new one and demonstrate beyond a shadow of a doubt that the PostFix people were releasing just as cockeyed a product as everyone else, if not a worse one. The bugs have been fixed now, but it still hasn't stood the test of time since it's still quite new, so I'll stick with Sendmail for general purpose machines until I see compelling reasons to do otherwise. === To: "Dagmar d'Surreal" <dagmar@dsurreal.org> Subject: Re: [svlug] non-religious? count me in! Date: Tue, 06 Feb 2001 22:03:03 -0800 From: J C Lawrence <claw@kanga.nu> On Tue, 6 Feb 2001 21:19:32 -0800 (PST) Dagmar d'Surreal <dagmar@dsurreal.org> wrote: > I've heard good things about Exim. There is much good to say about it. > I won't use PostFix primarily because when it first came out, they > made a BIG stink about how much all the other mailers sucked, and > how theirs was clearly superior all the rest, and how they hadn't > made any of the mistakes other people did. Actually, Wietse made a number of rather quiet anouncements which others then picked up and amplified to silly lengths. His initial posts were rather unassuming. > ...then the nice folks on Bugtraq proceeded to rip them a new one > and demonstrate beyond a shadow of a doubt that the PostFix people > were releasing just as cockeyed a product as everyone else, if not > a worse one. Its also worth noting that as of the initial announcements Postfix has been freely available as VMailer for more than a year, and had been actively used by a fairly large number of early adopters (I used to archive the postif lists -- number of poster addresses was in the high hundreds). So bunch of second stringers then started blabbing up Postfix, IBM stuck their foot in their mouth, and DJB took it all rather personally and set out to ridicule Postfix and Wietse. What followed were mostly local-system problems, and not a great many of them, tho several took serious thought and redesigns to fix (the spool handling went thru several evolutions during this period). As for it being so bad, or even worse, hardly. It was an interesting design and implementation that was the result of considerable thought and experience. As a 1.0 I'd say it stood up well -- but then security systems are like that: damned difficult to get perfect the first time. Postfix's bug rate has been admirably low since those days. ObDisclosure: For similar reasons I held back from using Postfix until about 6 months ago when I was forced to change MTA's on a list server as part of determining the causes of a system crash which occurred only under heavy mail loads (it was only a couple weeks ago that I finally narroed thr problem down to a TLB IPI wait bug in 2.2.18). Up till that point I'd been happily running Exim everywhere. Since that point I've done performance benchmarking of Exim and Postfix for a client (see this list's archives) as well as running it on half of my systems (mostly the servers, Exim on the desktops), and it has stood up admirably (~1M messages a day on my most active system). > The bugs have been fixed now, but it still hasn't stood the test > of time since it's still quite new... What is "new" is always a rather subjective thing. Postfix is about 4 years old now, maybe 5 (I'd have to go check for the exact date, and I'm tired), tho it took a couple years before 1.0 hit. That seems long enough to me to be worth examining as a core component. YMMV. > so I'll stick with Sendmail for general purpose machines until I > see compelling reasons to do otherwise. The config files and lack of auditability convinced me almost instantly that sendmail had no place on any system I owned. I just don't find that sort of stuff justifiable, not when there are other, more capable/faster/flexible/auditable/adminstratable/extensible/etc tools available. ===