SimpleBits | Panther Notes | Why Postfix
At the very nicely designed SimpleBits, Dan Cederholm wondered why Apple chose Postfix as the MTA for Panther.
In response Brian McCallister posted
this comment:
I have done a lot of research about MTAs, both for myself and for the email.deflexion.com services, and I have essentially come to the same conclusions as Brian. Although I still haven't completely decided between Qmail and Postfix because I love how easy it is for users to configure Qmail's "tagged addresses" (aka "disposable addresses" or "subaddresses").
Update 20-Nov-2003: Also see the message Re: sendmail vs qmail by Lars Hecking in the Procmail mailing list.
In response Brian McCallister posted
this comment:
Speaking to Postfix over Sendmail: First, sendmail has a long history of security problems analogous to the way that Windows has a long history of security problems. Postfix is much better designed from that perspective. Secondly, sendmail configuration is a bit of a black art -- while Postfix is pretty derned flexible it is also a lot easier to understand why it does what it does. Postfix, Exim, and Qmail are the major Sendmail alternatives (ie, provide sendmail drop-in functionality compared to pure SMTP etc). Exim is only marginally better architected than Sendmail. Qmail suffers from bizarre licensing (DJB is a brilliant coder, but is a pita with licensing from a software libre point of view). That leaves Postfix. Qmail is probably better (simpler, faster, as configurable) but Qmail configuration requires applying patches to the source tree (sets of patches are distributed for it still because of the licensing issues) in order to get certain bits of functionality that are just configuration in postfix.
But I ramble, so will hush up. Postfix included in Panther is a significant upgrade in my opinion (as a mixed *nix sysadmin and developer). Most people I know who run mta's on OS X use Postfix anyway.
I have done a lot of research about MTAs, both for myself and for the email.deflexion.com services, and I have essentially come to the same conclusions as Brian. Although I still haven't completely decided between Qmail and Postfix because I love how easy it is for users to configure Qmail's "tagged addresses" (aka "disposable addresses" or "subaddresses").
Update 20-Nov-2003: Also see the message Re: sendmail vs qmail by Lars Hecking in the Procmail mailing list.
Comments
Links to this page
Each item © Nancy McGough
Each comment © the author of the comment
Deflexion.com web site hosted
by DreamHost.com
←
More deflexions & reflexions, & feeds
available via the sidebar
top
&
![[link]](/_images/link20x16.gif){kind=small}
For bookmarks & links, please use
![[Feed]](/_images/feedicon12x12.png){kind=small}
Post a Comment
You can use some HTML tags, such as <b>, <i>, <a>