Sendmail vs. ?
Hey all, I've been using sendmail 8.11 for the last couple of years, and while not real easy to configure, it has fit my purposes well. I was using the rbl to cut down on unwanted spam for my users, but with the departure of the rbl, I'm finding my server passing more spam to my users, I may be looking in the wrong place, but the only solutions I've found, like keeping my own spammer db, would require too much of a time commmitment from me. I've read through several holy wars on exim,qmail, postfix and sendmail, and without starting another one, I'd like to get some input on what the list is using. Here are my basic requirments: security conscious virtual email accounts, likely using LDAP spam control ease of configuration Im kinda leaning toward postfix, but that's just because I like the cover of the book I saw at borders yesterday g Duane Powers uberLAN.Net -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Sendmail vs. ?
What do you mean departure of the rbl? blackhole.mail-abuse.org still works? I have been researching MTAs for a little while trying to figure out what I want to use instead of sendmail. I was looking for maildir delivery, ease of configuration, support for virtual hosting, and virtual accounts. Exim does all of that for me quite well. Qmail does too but I hate that whole /var/qmail directory structure. It isn't GPL either... Exim also has TONS of documentation. I briefly looked at PostFix and it seems like a viable alternative as well but has less docs than exim. Greg On Wed, 27 Jun 2001, Duane Powers wrote: Hey all, I've been using sendmail 8.11 for the last couple of years, and while not real easy to configure, it has fit my purposes well. I was using the rbl to cut down on unwanted spam for my users, but with the departure of the rbl, I'm finding my server passing more spam to my users, I may be looking in the wrong place, but the only solutions I've found, like keeping my own spammer db, would require too much of a time commmitment from me. I've read through several holy wars on exim,qmail, postfix and sendmail, and without starting another one, I'd like to get some input on what the list is using. Here are my basic requirments: security conscious virtual email accounts, likely using LDAP spam control ease of configuration Im kinda leaning toward postfix, but that's just because I like the cover of the book I saw at borders yesterday g Duane Powers uberLAN.Net -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- Greg Rowe Paranoia is a virtue. http://www.therowes.net -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Sendmail vs. ?
Greg Rowe wrote: What do you mean departure of the rbl? blackhole.mail-abuse.org still works? I read a thread on one of the debian lists a couple weeks ago about one of the spam databases going away... a couple of days later, I started getting lots of this daemon.log.0:Jun 21 22:18:37 ns1 named[9282]: bad referral (vix.com ! rbl.maps.vix.com) from [204.152.184.64].53 Then if you go to www.orbs.org you get this: Due to circumstances beyond our control, the ORBS website is no longer available. Perhaps I jumped to a wrong conclusion, or drew a link between orbs and the rbl that doesn't exist... I have been researching MTAs for a little while trying to figure out what I want to use instead of sendmail. I was looking for maildir delivery, ease of configuration, support for virtual hosting, and virtual accounts. Exim does all of that for me quite well. Qmail does too but I hate that whole /var/qmail directory structure. It isn't GPL either... Exim also has TONS of documentation. I briefly looked at PostFix and it seems like a viable alternative as well but has less docs than exim. Greg snip Duane Powers uberLAN.net -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Sendmail vs. ?
Check out mail-abuse.org. They are the ones who actually run the RBL. vix.com no longer mirrors the RBL. According to the mail-abuse web page vix.com stopped on June 15th. I didn't read why..I would have been very sad to see the RBL go away. You scared me ;) Greg On Wed, 27 Jun 2001, Duane Powers wrote: Greg Rowe wrote: What do you mean departure of the rbl? blackhole.mail-abuse.org still works? I read a thread on one of the debian lists a couple weeks ago about one of the spam databases going away... a couple of days later, I started getting lots of this daemon.log.0:Jun 21 22:18:37 ns1 named[9282]: bad referral (vix.com ! rbl.maps.vix.com) from [204.152.184.64].53 Then if you go to www.orbs.org you get this: Due to circumstances beyond our control, the ORBS website is no longer available. Perhaps I jumped to a wrong conclusion, or drew a link between orbs and the rbl that doesn't exist... I have been researching MTAs for a little while trying to figure out what I want to use instead of sendmail. I was looking for maildir delivery, ease of configuration, support for virtual hosting, and virtual accounts. Exim does all of that for me quite well. Qmail does too but I hate that whole /var/qmail directory structure. It isn't GPL either... Exim also has TONS of documentation. I briefly looked at PostFix and it seems like a viable alternative as well but has less docs than exim. Greg snip Duane Powers uberLAN.net -- Greg Rowe Paranoia is a virtue. http://www.therowes.net -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Sendmail vs. ?
On Wed, Jun 27, 2001 at 01:18:41PM -0400, Richard A Nelson wrote: I guess my thoughts are: 1) Let me know what sendmail can do to help 2) If you want to switch, check to see if you've got anything tricky in your rules - you *WILL* loose functionality with any other MTA (turing complete control language). If you've a fairly genereric sendmail.mc - you're probably ok This is not true, Exim allows much more flexibility with configuration, sendmail cannot handle seperate virtual domains (i.e. [EMAIL PROTECTED] is not the same as [EMAIL PROTECTED]) which is very usefull when running, for instance, web-based email services, and you don't want the usernames for it to conflict with your shell accounts on another domain, same server. 3) I've heard (no experience) that Postfix is probably the easiest migration It seems that you've had little experience with anything but sendmail, so you're opinion may be rather biased. I have used sendmail, exim, postfix and qmail and I think that exim and postfix are very good, high performance yet easily configurable and maintainable mail servers. Qmail I here gives better performance, but it's a hassle to maintain. I migrated from sendmail to exim and it was extremely easy (thanks to exim's amble documentation). -- Nick Jennings -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Sendmail vs. ?
Nick Jennings wrote: It seems that you've had little experience with anything but sendmail, so you're opinion may be rather biased. I have used sendmail, exim, postfix and qmail and I think that exim and postfix are very good, high performance yet easily configurable and maintainable mail servers. Qmail I here gives better performance, but it's a hassle to maintain. I migrated from sendmail to exim and it was extremely easy (thanks to exim's amble documentation). Here comes the holy war Seriously though, I use qmail+vpopmail and its easy, fast, secure and fun. The only pain is on instalation. Aside from that it could be a little of a pain to migrate your accounts but a little scripting and kazam, it will be done. Its real easy to administer and has a bunch of quota options per domain and stuff like that. Everyone hates its /var/qmail structure and i am not the exception but i think its well worth it when combined with vpopmail's structure: /home/vpopmail/domains/*/users/* I love the thing and i think it has earned its reputation for being a very secure server...although we all know that its never the software's fault. G'Luck Alex -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Sendmail vs. ?
All other issues aside ... some might find the qmail license to be quite onerous. -- Jean-Paul Stewart Senior Systems Administrator CarbonMedia, Inc. 114 East 25th Street, Eighth Floor New York, NY 10010 Phone: 212.253.7180 Fax: 212.253.8467 http://www.carbonmedia.com/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Sendmail vs. ?
On Wed, Jun 27, 2001 at 08:48:19AM -0700, Duane Powers wrote: security conscious virtual email accounts, likely using LDAP spam control ease of configuration Im kinda leaning toward postfix, but that's just because I like the cover of the book I saw at borders yesterday g postfix is very good at all four of your criteria. it's also very easy to migrate to postfix from sendmail - it's designed to be mostly backwards compatible - e.g. you can use the same aliases, transports, virtuser etc files. the formats of those files are either the same, or backwards compatible - e.g. postfix's virtual table allows multiple addresses on the RHS of the table so you can have a message delivered to two or more mailboxes. with sendmail if you wanted to do that, you had to create an alias with two or more addresses and then make the virtuser table entry point to the alias. a useful feature of postfix while you're converting a system from sendmail is the softbounce = yes feature. that causes all mail that would bounce to just be rejected with a 4xx try again later code. the following advice applies if you're running a mail server for dozens or more people. if it's just a home mail server handling your own personal mail you may prefer to do it the quick and dirty way and risk bouncing a few messages... whatever MTA you go to, the best thing to do is research and experiment first. get another box (an old pentium or 486 will do), install your new MTA on it and get a feel for how it works. then trash it and install sendmail on the same box and configure it in a similar manner to your main server. test that it works. then convert it to your new MTA and test that it works. if all goes well, you'll have had a successful conversion as practice. now write out a TODO list of each step you have to do in the conversion. e.g. - install postfix - shutdown postfix so that it's not accepting mail while i'm configuring it - configure /etc/postfix/main.cf - [ list of specific features you need enabled/disabled ] - softbounce = yes - copy /etc/mail/aliases to /etc/aliases. run newaliases - copy /etc/mail/transport to /etc/postfix/transport. edit if required. run postmap transport - copy /etc/mail/virtuser to /etc/postfix/virtual. edit as required. run postmap virtual ...etc. if you plan out exactly what you are going to do then there is very little chance of anything going wrong. finally, begin the migration of your real mail server. tick off each step as you do it. take it slow, and don't panic. the slow methodical approach is the best way here. monitor the log files when you're done, and shutdown the MTA (e.g. run /etc/init.d/postfix stop) at the first sign of trouble so that you can investigate and fix it quickly. craig -- craig sanders [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fabricati Diem, PVNC. -- motto of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Sendmail vs. ?
On Wed, Jun 27, 2001 at 07:27:52PM -0700, Duane Powers wrote: Fantastic advice, thanks. one thing i forgot to mention: if there's any mail left in the sendmail queue after the conversion, then postfix won't know about it and won't be able to deliver it. before you uninstall sendmail, shut it down so that it is no longer accepting incoming mail. then flush the mail queue so that no outbound mail gets lost in the transition. this may require that you have another machine set up as a smart host, just to get all outbound mail onto another machine. craig -- craig sanders [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fabricati Diem, PVNC. -- motto of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Sendmail vs. ?
DP Hey all, DP I've been using sendmail 8.11 for the last couple of years, and while DP not real easy to configure, it has fit my purposes well. I was using DP the rbl to cut down on unwanted spam for my users, but with the DP departure of the rbl, I'm finding my server passing more spam to my DP users, I may be looking in the wrong place, but the only solutions DP I've found, like keeping my own spammer db, would require too much of DP a time commmitment from me. I've read through several holy wars on DP exim,qmail, postfix and sendmail, and without starting another one, DP I'd like to get some input on what the list is using. Here are my DP basic requirments: DP security conscious DP virtual email accounts, likely using LDAP DP spam control DP ease of configuration DP Im kinda leaning toward postfix, but that's just because I like the DP cover of the book I saw at borders yesterday g Postfix should satisfy your requirements. 1) security conscious IMHO Postfix is very secure 2) virtual email accounts, likely using LDAP In latests versions of Postfix you can use transport named 'virtual' which allows to create easily virtual mailboxes. And Postfix can lookup users in LDAP database. 3) spam control never used it but I've seen in Postfix docs mention about it. If you have installed postfix check /usr/share/doc/postfix/html/uce.html 4) ease of configuration IMHO Postfix satisfies this requirement also. -- -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- | Ilya Martynov (http://martynov.org/)| | GnuPG 1024D/323BDEE6 D7F7 561E 4C1D 8A15 8E80 E4AE BE1A 53EB 323B DEE6 | | AGAVA Software Company (http://www.agava.com/) | -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Re: Sendmail vs. ?
What do you mean departure of the rbl? blackhole.mail-abuse.org still works? I have been researching MTAs for a little while trying to figure out what I want to use instead of sendmail. I was looking for maildir delivery, ease of configuration, support for virtual hosting, and virtual accounts. Exim does all of that for me quite well. Qmail does too but I hate that whole /var/qmail directory structure. It isn't GPL either... Exim also has TONS of documentation. I briefly looked at PostFix and it seems like a viable alternative as well but has less docs than exim. Greg On Wed, 27 Jun 2001, Duane Powers wrote: Hey all, I've been using sendmail 8.11 for the last couple of years, and while not real easy to configure, it has fit my purposes well. I was using the rbl to cut down on unwanted spam for my users, but with the departure of the rbl, I'm finding my server passing more spam to my users, I may be looking in the wrong place, but the only solutions I've found, like keeping my own spammer db, would require too much of a time commmitment from me. I've read through several holy wars on exim,qmail, postfix and sendmail, and without starting another one, I'd like to get some input on what the list is using. Here are my basic requirments: security conscious virtual email accounts, likely using LDAP spam control ease of configuration Im kinda leaning toward postfix, but that's just because I like the cover of the book I saw at borders yesterday g Duane Powers uberLAN.Net -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- Greg Rowe Paranoia is a virtue. http://www.therowes.net
Re: Sendmail vs. ?
Greg Rowe wrote: What do you mean departure of the rbl? blackhole.mail-abuse.org still works? I read a thread on one of the debian lists a couple weeks ago about one of the spam databases going away... a couple of days later, I started getting lots of this daemon.log.0:Jun 21 22:18:37 ns1 named[9282]: bad referral (vix.com ! rbl.maps.vix.com) from [204.152.184.64].53 Then if you go to www.orbs.org you get this: Due to circumstances beyond our control, the ORBS website is no longer available. Perhaps I jumped to a wrong conclusion, or drew a link between orbs and the rbl that doesn't exist... I have been researching MTAs for a little while trying to figure out what I want to use instead of sendmail. I was looking for maildir delivery, ease of configuration, support for virtual hosting, and virtual accounts. Exim does all of that for me quite well. Qmail does too but I hate that whole /var/qmail directory structure. It isn't GPL either... Exim also has TONS of documentation. I briefly looked at PostFix and it seems like a viable alternative as well but has less docs than exim. Greg snip Duane Powers uberLAN.net
Re: Sendmail vs. ?
Check out mail-abuse.org. They are the ones who actually run the RBL. vix.com no longer mirrors the RBL. According to the mail-abuse web page vix.com stopped on June 15th. I didn't read why..I would have been very sad to see the RBL go away. You scared me ;) Greg On Wed, 27 Jun 2001, Duane Powers wrote: Greg Rowe wrote: What do you mean departure of the rbl? blackhole.mail-abuse.org still works? I read a thread on one of the debian lists a couple weeks ago about one of the spam databases going away... a couple of days later, I started getting lots of this daemon.log.0:Jun 21 22:18:37 ns1 named[9282]: bad referral (vix.com ! rbl.maps.vix.com) from [204.152.184.64].53 Then if you go to www.orbs.org you get this: Due to circumstances beyond our control, the ORBS website is no longer available. Perhaps I jumped to a wrong conclusion, or drew a link between orbs and the rbl that doesn't exist... I have been researching MTAs for a little while trying to figure out what I want to use instead of sendmail. I was looking for maildir delivery, ease of configuration, support for virtual hosting, and virtual accounts. Exim does all of that for me quite well. Qmail does too but I hate that whole /var/qmail directory structure. It isn't GPL either... Exim also has TONS of documentation. I briefly looked at PostFix and it seems like a viable alternative as well but has less docs than exim. Greg snip Duane Powers uberLAN.net -- Greg Rowe Paranoia is a virtue. http://www.therowes.net
Re: Sendmail vs. ?
On Wed, Jun 27, 2001 at 01:18:41PM -0400, Richard A Nelson wrote: I guess my thoughts are: 1) Let me know what sendmail can do to help 2) If you want to switch, check to see if you've got anything tricky in your rules - you *WILL* loose functionality with any other MTA (turing complete control language). If you've a fairly genereric sendmail.mc - you're probably ok This is not true, Exim allows much more flexibility with configuration, sendmail cannot handle seperate virtual domains (i.e. [EMAIL PROTECTED] is not the same as [EMAIL PROTECTED]) which is very usefull when running, for instance, web-based email services, and you don't want the usernames for it to conflict with your shell accounts on another domain, same server. 3) I've heard (no experience) that Postfix is probably the easiest migration It seems that you've had little experience with anything but sendmail, so you're opinion may be rather biased. I have used sendmail, exim, postfix and qmail and I think that exim and postfix are very good, high performance yet easily configurable and maintainable mail servers. Qmail I here gives better performance, but it's a hassle to maintain. I migrated from sendmail to exim and it was extremely easy (thanks to exim's amble documentation). -- Nick Jennings
Re: Sendmail vs. ?
Nick Jennings wrote: It seems that you've had little experience with anything but sendmail, so you're opinion may be rather biased. I have used sendmail, exim, postfix and qmail and I think that exim and postfix are very good, high performance yet easily configurable and maintainable mail servers. Qmail I here gives better performance, but it's a hassle to maintain. I migrated from sendmail to exim and it was extremely easy (thanks to exim's amble documentation). Here comes the holy war Seriously though, I use qmail+vpopmail and its easy, fast, secure and fun. The only pain is on instalation. Aside from that it could be a little of a pain to migrate your accounts but a little scripting and kazam, it will be done. Its real easy to administer and has a bunch of quota options per domain and stuff like that. Everyone hates its /var/qmail structure and i am not the exception but i think its well worth it when combined with vpopmail's structure: /home/vpopmail/domains/*/users/* I love the thing and i think it has earned its reputation for being a very secure server...although we all know that its never the software's fault. G'Luck Alex
Re: Sendmail vs. ?
All other issues aside ... some might find the qmail license to be quite onerous. -- Jean-Paul Stewart Senior Systems Administrator CarbonMedia, Inc. 114 East 25th Street, Eighth Floor New York, NY 10010 Phone: 212.253.7180 Fax: 212.253.8467 http://www.carbonmedia.com/
Re: Sendmail vs. ?
On Wed, Jun 27, 2001 at 08:48:19AM -0700, Duane Powers wrote: security conscious virtual email accounts, likely using LDAP spam control ease of configuration Im kinda leaning toward postfix, but that's just because I like the cover of the book I saw at borders yesterday g postfix is very good at all four of your criteria. it's also very easy to migrate to postfix from sendmail - it's designed to be mostly backwards compatible - e.g. you can use the same aliases, transports, virtuser etc files. the formats of those files are either the same, or backwards compatible - e.g. postfix's virtual table allows multiple addresses on the RHS of the table so you can have a message delivered to two or more mailboxes. with sendmail if you wanted to do that, you had to create an alias with two or more addresses and then make the virtuser table entry point to the alias. a useful feature of postfix while you're converting a system from sendmail is the softbounce = yes feature. that causes all mail that would bounce to just be rejected with a 4xx try again later code. the following advice applies if you're running a mail server for dozens or more people. if it's just a home mail server handling your own personal mail you may prefer to do it the quick and dirty way and risk bouncing a few messages... whatever MTA you go to, the best thing to do is research and experiment first. get another box (an old pentium or 486 will do), install your new MTA on it and get a feel for how it works. then trash it and install sendmail on the same box and configure it in a similar manner to your main server. test that it works. then convert it to your new MTA and test that it works. if all goes well, you'll have had a successful conversion as practice. now write out a TODO list of each step you have to do in the conversion. e.g. - install postfix - shutdown postfix so that it's not accepting mail while i'm configuring it - configure /etc/postfix/main.cf - [ list of specific features you need enabled/disabled ] - softbounce = yes - copy /etc/mail/aliases to /etc/aliases. run newaliases - copy /etc/mail/transport to /etc/postfix/transport. edit if required. run postmap transport - copy /etc/mail/virtuser to /etc/postfix/virtual. edit as required. run postmap virtual ...etc. if you plan out exactly what you are going to do then there is very little chance of anything going wrong. finally, begin the migration of your real mail server. tick off each step as you do it. take it slow, and don't panic. the slow methodical approach is the best way here. monitor the log files when you're done, and shutdown the MTA (e.g. run /etc/init.d/postfix stop) at the first sign of trouble so that you can investigate and fix it quickly. craig -- craig sanders [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fabricati Diem, PVNC. -- motto of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch
Re: Sendmail vs. ?
On Wed, Jun 27, 2001 at 07:27:52PM -0700, Duane Powers wrote: Fantastic advice, thanks. one thing i forgot to mention: if there's any mail left in the sendmail queue after the conversion, then postfix won't know about it and won't be able to deliver it. before you uninstall sendmail, shut it down so that it is no longer accepting incoming mail. then flush the mail queue so that no outbound mail gets lost in the transition. this may require that you have another machine set up as a smart host, just to get all outbound mail onto another machine. craig -- craig sanders [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fabricati Diem, PVNC. -- motto of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch
