Christian Campbell said: > I have intermediate experience with Linux. Even less with mail servers. > I'm running a RedHat 8 server that needs to accept mail from the world as > our primary mailserver. I'm debating as to whether I should use postfix > or sendmail (or something else). Anyone have any pros/cons to either of > these? I'd like something simple, secure and have the option of doing some > type of spam catching with some type of package (open source, free / > cheep) that integrates easily. Any and all help appreciated!
I've used sendmail 8.8.x, 8.9.x, & 8.11.x as well as Postfix 1.1.x, and qmail(forgot the version). postfix is my favorite. It is fairly simple to configure, pretty secure, and has a ton of anti spam stuff built right in. I stopped using sendmail since it was getting increasingly complicated, and to bugs in the bleeding edge debian packages about a year ago when I tried to migrate from 8.11.x to 8.12.x. Currently my main setup is Postfix+LDAP+Spamassassin+Sanitizer, I have setup other systems with Postfix+LDAP+amavis, and I spent probably a hundred hours going through spam messages over the past year or so writing filters for postfix's regexp header checker. Newer versions of postfix can check the body of messages as well. Integration of spamassassin with postfix was easy, for me at least. It wasn't as simple as dropping in a script and having it run but by my experience it was easy(easy in comparison to spending a full day tryin to get sendmail 8.12.x to compile/configure with amavis). My first try it probably took an hour, which including fetching newer versions of spamassassin, sanitizer and libnet-smtp I think it was, configuring it, and testing it. Running spamassassin+sanitizer on all messages DRAMATICALLY increases the load on the system. Probably by a factor of 500 or more. My home mail server is a p3-800 1GB ram with dual 100GB WD(8mb cache) drives in raid1, and it takes on average 3-5 seconds to deliver a message, it can take much longer if the message is really big. If you were to put virus scanning on top of that, add another 2-3 seconds per message depending on your system. There is a way of reducing load by using the spamd(?) spamassasin daemon but I still hear there are some potential security issues with it, so i haven't tried it. but by itself, with no addons whatsoever postfix has a ton of ways to reduce spam. Most of which cannot be used on high traffic mailservers since it creates a very high number of false positives unfortunately. I just started using postfix as my primary MTA almost a year ago. nate -- redhat-list mailing list unsubscribe mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list
