Kurt Seifried wrote:
I agree that a lot of people switch to qmail or postfix because of supposed improved security....
If you are unable to configure your MTA properly, it doesn't matter which MTA you use. OBTW: 'you' as in 'people' ;-)
...But when I ask them which features specifically, I either get a feature that sendmail has as well or no answer at all. I've been trying out postfix lately, and while I have to admit that the configuration is a little easier, I haven't seen any huge other advantages yet...
I've heard that Postfix is about 3 times faster than Sendmail.
...I don't know qmail well enough to say anything specific about that, but I have used sendmail for a long time now, and it has served me well.
IMHO Sendmail is a bit of a 'monster' to configure.
I think sendmail supports it now, but postfix supports using databases as the config files, i.e. virtualusertable is in a MySQL DB, meaning changing it on the fly is trivial...
Postfix has support for maps in LDAP as well.
...Also one HUGE advantage in postfix and qmail is that they only run a small component as root, so if there is a buffer overflow/etc it is less likely to be fatal, whereas sendmail is a huge blob of run as root code.
Postfix does not run as root at all. There are only one component which needs a sgid bit set (postdrop). You can disable that too - but then you need a world writable maildrop directory. (SuSE's default postfix configuration run chroot'ed and does not use sgid). -- Ørnulf Nielsen