[Mailman-Users] best MTA to use with mailman?

[J C Lawrence]

On Thu, 05 Jul 2001 17:13:30 +0100 (BST) 
lee bolding <lee.bolding at ukonline.co.uk> wrote:

> by "best" I mean fastest, issues of setting up etc are not a
> problem.

MTA performance is mostly an issue of configuration, both of the
MTA, system, and MLM.  It is something of a black art.  Minimally it
is incredibly subjective to your system and its loads.  This
encludes things like choice of filesystem for the spool, tailoring
of file system (atime, inode density, block size, etc), number of
spindles and RAID type for spool, use of solid state disks, envelope
size, fall back rates for slow MXes, automatic relegation of known
slow MXes to second/other system, number of parallel deliveries,
%age of slow MXes in load, traffic and distribution of traffic over
time, burstiness of traffic, size of outbound pipe, presence of
local cacheing name server, setting of minimum TTLs on name server,
etc.

That said the normal answers are one of Postfix, Exim, or QMail.
I like, use and recommend Postfix and Exim.  

> I've used postfix before, its quick and has the ability to use an
> LDAP directory for its aliases DB - which makes creating lists so
> much easier, especially via web.

mailman does not have support for deriving its membership lists from
a back end service.  Currently all member lists are private to
Mailman.

> Does anybody have any other MTAs to suggest? and what are the
> reasons that these MTAs are "good"?

I won't comment on QMail as I've not run it (I have disagreements
with DJB, and aspects of QMail's design).

Exim is wonderously (staggeringly?) configurable and extensible, but
that is based on the fact that it is also monolithic which allows
its various bits to have carnal knowledge of operations.  Its also
damned fast.

Postfix follows the distributed distrust model so popularised in
recent years.  In my tests the early attack rate of the performance
graphs for Postfix is considerably steeper than for Postfix.  I've
also found that once the queue size starts building that Exim's and
Postfix's performance curves are very similar (see previous
traffic/discussion on this list).

-- 
J C Lawrence                                             claw at kanga.nu
---------(*)                                http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/
I never claimed to be human.