A bit late to the party here.
When I deploy a new mailserver, I consider postfix, exim and qmail.
From practical experience, what are the advantages, disadvantages,
and adaptation scenarios of postfix, exim, and qmail?
Questions like this can very quickly devolve into people just listing
their setups and preferences. Or worse. As such, here's my contribution.
I've been running qmail (or at least something which originally started
as qmail) since the turn of the millennium. There are still pieces of
the original software left, and a lot of the original system design,
but it being modular, various bits have gotten (mostly drop-in)
replacements over the years.
Today it's mostly s/qmail[1], with qpsmtpd[2] in front, SpamAssassin
for filtering, and Dovecot as LDA. While it's running just fine, and is
maintainable (for some value of), I would hardly recommend anything of
this sort to anyone today. It's more like an old marriage of
convenience and habit that you can't quite muster the work and effort
to get out of anytime soon. If you're already running qmail, you love
it and are familiar with it, by all means, enjoy. But choosing qmail
over other options for a new setup today probably wouldn't make too
much sense. Should you really wish to, there's a plethora of forks,
patches, reimplementations and reimaginings to choose between, though,
with varying degrees of faithfulness to djb's many original ideas,
concepts and designs. I could probably list at least five, ranging from
hardly maintained, to actively being worked on.
Now, if I was setting up a new system today (and one of these days I
might), I would go for Postfix, with Haraka[3] in front for inbound,
Dovecut using LMTP, and Rspamd. Not because I particularly love the
idea of an email server written in JavaScript and/or running in
Node.js[4], but because it does everything I love about qpsmtpd (and it
grew out of it), but unlike it, is actively maintained, and also does
all the things I *miss* in qpsmtpd.
As others have said, YMMV, so the right fit for you will depend largely
on your needs (and also to a degree preferences). Postfix has been
covered well enough already, but I just like the philosophy of it being
(in principle) infinitely extendable to suit whatever needs you may
have now or in the future - and with a relative ease that seems nearly
utopian for a qmail admin. That said, Haraka also does have outbound
support now, so (again depending on ones needs) perhaps it might be
possible to just forego Postfix altogether, should one wish to.
If anyone on the list has first-hand experience with Haraka, I for one
would love hearing about it.
[1] <https://www.fehcom.de/sqmail/sqmail.html>
[2] <https://smtpd.github.io/qpsmtpd/>
[3] <https://haraka.github.io/>
[4] Then again, I didn't initially love the idea of a Perl email server
either, but that has honestly proven to be a non-issue
--
Christer Mjellem Strand
System Administrator
_______________________________________________
mailop mailing list
mailop@mailop.org
https://list.mailop.org/listinfo/mailop
