[Mailman-Users] optimizing mail delivery

[Barry A. Warsaw]

>>>>> "JCL" == J C Lawrence <claw at cp.net> writes:

    JCL> Postfix is impressive.  I've been archiving the Postfix lists
    JCL> at Kanga.Nu for a while now, but don't run the MTA myself yet
    JCL> (happy with Exim and more more important fish to fry than an
    JCL> MTA change).  I have a number of friends, some running large
    JCL> sites and large mail loads, that are happily running Postfix.
    JCL> I'm encouraged by the traffic I see on the lists and by
    JCL> Vietse's behaviour on the lists (especially compared to Dan
    JCL> B).

I looked at a bunch of MTAs when I got our new python.org Ultra2.
Like almost everyone else, I just can't deal with sendmail's
atrocious complexity (of which even the bat book only begins to help
with).  Based on all the comments here, I looked at qmail, exim, and
postfix.  My time is limited so I figured I'd only get a chance to
really dig deeply into one of them, and if that was successful, would
not actually install and play with the others.

I dismissed qmail ironically because it wasn't similar enough to
sendmail in a few key areas (e.g. alias and .forward files).  Those
bits are easy to understand; we have a lot of different people
potentially maintaing the mail system and I didn't want to have to
worry about teaching them all the new interfaces.  The stuff I'd read
about dealing with the maintainer of qmail made me think twice too.

I liked what I saw about exim, but I had some concerns about it's
security.  Maybe I am being overly paranoid (or ignorantly propagating
unsubstantiated rumor :), but I didn't have time to start down that
path to have to back out later.

So that left postfix, and I liked what I read about it's performance
and security.  Obviously Wieste has plenty of credentials in the
security arena.  Postfix was very easy to get configured and installed
exactly the way I wanted.  My sole unresolved issue is the way it
formats error messages when scripts filters exit with non-zero status
(it wraps the script's output, which obvious messes with Python
tracebacks :)

Anyway, so far so good.
-Barry