On Sun, Jan 05, 2014 at 08:48:50AM +1100, Cameron Simpson wrote: > On 04Jan2014 20:01, Matthias Apitz <g...@unixarea.de> wrote: > > El día Sunday, January 05, 2014 a las 02:50:12AM +0800, Chris Down escribió: > > > On 2014-01-04 19:35:19 +0100, Ulrich Lauther wrote: > > > > Recent posts made me aware of the fact, that mutt supports SMPT. > > > > So far I have been using postfix for mail transport. > > > > Which way is better, and why? > > > > > > "Better" is subjective. Using Postfix for this is pretty heavy duty over > > > using a purpose-built MTA. > > > > I'm using mutt (right now by typing) on my FreeBSD netbook, connected > > via UMTS WAN to my ISP. My mutt drops the mail (this mail) to the local > > MTA (sendmail) and this takes care for the transport to the next MX hop, > > even if the WAN link is down; the mail gets queued until the link comes > > up again. I think this, queuing, is a big advantage over talking SMTP > > directly by mutt. > > I agree. I'm running postfix on my Mac (it ships with postfix installed). > Local queuing. Automatic retry accordidng to a sensible policy. > > AND:... All the local systems that send email (eg cron and innumerable > shell scripts) can send email via the UNIX standard "sendmail" > executable. > > Use a real mail system locally. A win.
unless you try to do something like multiple email providers for one user which is very easy to do with anything but sendmail/postfix/exim. I have done this on all three and got tired, after every system upgrade some incompatible change breaks it and even the most basic smarthost configuration stops working, not to mention the multiple accounts which always required some configuration acrobatics. Also, having mail comming from mutt going through postfix to a smarthost generates headers which increase the spam score of your email dramatically because the headers are very similar (or practically indisinguishable) to headers that would appear from an open relay. If mail queueing is a requirement esmtp has it. Although it needs fixing to work reliably it is still much easier than configuring one of the big programs. I would not touch sendmail/postfix/exim again unless I want to run a real public mail server. Richard --- Name and OpenPGP keys available from pgp key servers
