# Looking at other MTAs...

## Dralnu

I'm wondering - what kind of comments can you make on diffrent MTAs? I'm using (currently) esmtp, and am thinking about using something diffrent, IF I can find something decent.

What I'd be looking for is:

+Something I can deliver mail to myself w/o it hitting a server in a bunker in Russia or something like that (keep it seperate from the net, basically)

+Something that is fairly simple to use, yet powerful

+Something along the lines of sendmail, but I'm asking this because I want to know what else there is out there to see if there is a better option.

EDIT:

+SECURE!

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## Xaid

I have fetchmail running in a cron job every 20 minutes which downloads the emails from my different email accounts, then it passes it to Postfix then procmail (to separate it into different folders depending on different criteria like originating email address, mailing lists...etc) and I am using mutt as my email client which sends the emails via msmtp using my ISP's SMTP server.

I was using amavisd + spamassassin + clamav but since I barely get spam, it seemed like an overkill solution so I took it out of the picture.

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## Dralnu

Can postfix deliver mail locally w/o having to bounce it from another server?

Right now I run fetchmail (from within mutt) to esmtp (I think) to procmail. Right now procmail isn't doing much (need a decent guide to it, but thats for other searching/my own work to deal with), and I havn't ever really messed with spamassassin/clamav before, but thats not something for this thread to discuss, either.

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## JC99

I've been using qmail for years now and I have never had a problem with it.

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## darkphader

 *Dralnu wrote:*   

> Can postfix deliver mail locally w/o having to bounce it from another server?

 

Absolutely.

For my home server I run fetchmail to postfix to cyrus-imap, no need for procmail or maildrop as cyrus-imap has sieve built-in. Of course, on my internal network everything is delivered locally (via postfix) - fetchmail is not involved.

Chris

PS Don't know for sure but I doubt that esmtp would have the flexibility that I require.

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## Dralnu

 *darkphader wrote:*   

>  *Dralnu wrote:*   Can postfix deliver mail locally w/o having to bounce it from another server? 
> 
> Absolutely.
> 
> For my home server I run fetchmail to postfix to cyrus-imap, no need for procmail or maildrop as cyrus-imap has sieve built-in. Of course, on my internal network everything is delivered locally (via postfix) - fetchmail is not involved.
> ...

 

I'm using esmtp currently because when I was setting things up the first time, it was what was suggested, and was the lightest of all the MTAs I could find other then ssmtp, which from what I was told didn't have a way to deliver mail locally w/o having to do some weird mail-fu that involved other machines for some odd reason.

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## Dralnu

 *EvilEye wrote:*   

> I've been using qmail for years now and I have never had a problem with it.

 

I was looking into it (as well as Exim and Xmail). Can you give me an idea on what got you into using it over, say, sendmail or postfix?

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## nahpets

Postfix seems to be the preferred MTA these days because of the easy with which it can be configured.  Check out this poll entitled "What is the Best Mail Server on Gentoo? Why?".

I myself use fetchmail + cron to fetch mail from multiple pop accounts and deliver it to postfix locally.  You can set up kmail to point to a local "maildir" folder to fetch new mail delivered by postfix.  It's quite easy to set up and works well.

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## Dralnu

I think I'll just give them each a shot, lol. Postfix right now is looking better and better (I knew it was fairly highly regarded), but I'm still looking for comments on others. Qmail and Exim seem nice as well, so I think I'll try them as well.

Just have to see where everything goes.

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## Dralnu

This is the one thing that is bugging me - Why the f*** does qmail/exim/postfix require db? It shouldn't be storing anything in a database, so why is it pulling one in?

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## darkphader

 *Dralnu wrote:*   

> This is the one thing that is bugging me - Why the f*** does qmail/exim/postfix require db? It shouldn't be storing anything in a database, so why is it pulling one in?

 By default it stores the indexed (hashed) versions of its maps (such as aliases) in such db's.

EDIT: Without db support it couldn't even use the default indexed /etc/mail/aliases.db created by running newaliases against /etc/mail/aliases.

From Postfix's DB_README: *Quote:*   

> Some UNIXes ship without Berkeley DB support; for historical reasons these use DBM files instead. A problem with DBM files is that they can store only limited amounts of data. To build Postfix with Berkeley DB support you need to download and install the source code from http://www.oracle.com/database/berkeley-db/.

 

My guess is that Berkeley's db isn't strictly required as one can use cdb, ldap, mysql, etc. for most of the indexed maps instead. Maybe one can avoid the hashed versions altogether, I don't know for sure, but performance is likely to suffer.

See section 4.3 in http://www.postfix.org/INSTALL.html#4

Chris

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## Dralnu

Makes some sense I guess.

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## rshadow

I would just like to say that I have used postfix, qmail, and now exim, and out of the three I enjoy exim the most. Everybody seems to like postfix, but I don't like it at all, it seems clunky to me.

Anyways exim does not require a database, the documentation is the best for any MTA, and it can do everything you need it to.

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## Dralnu

I'm fairly sure I went to look at it, and db DID pop up as a dep. You sure it doesn't need db?

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## JC99

 *Dralnu wrote:*   

> I was looking into it (as well as Exim and Xmail). Can you give me an idea on what got you into using it over, say, sendmail or postfix?

 

I was looking for an MTA just like you are now and decided to use qmail for no particular reason and haven't looked back since.

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## kashani

Pretty much everything requires db (we are talking about db4 and so on yes?) these days as flat files are slow. Even Apache will read your vhost files and hash them into gdbm, berkdb, or whatever for fast lookups. This is why you can do 20k vhosts in Apache without issues, Same goes for mail servers. If you do not use something besides flat files your lookups become unbearably slow at the 3-5k entries range which isn't that large in a mail system. Why is the inclusion of db such a big deal?

For the record I prefer Postfix and qmail was last updated in May 1998 and requires big time patch-o-rama to do anything useful these days. Luckily Gentoo devs take care of most of this for you, but qmail is a dead end and should be abandoned. 

kashani

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## nrosier

 *Dralnu wrote:*   

> Can postfix deliver mail locally w/o having to bounce it from another server?

 

Be carefull when doing that. I've noticed that a lot of dynamic address from ISP are on RBL (because of botnets etc...)

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## darkphader

 *nrosier wrote:*   

>  *Dralnu wrote:*   Can postfix deliver mail locally w/o having to bounce it from another server? 
> 
> Be carefull when doing that. I've noticed that a lot of dynamic address from ISP are on RBL (because of botnets etc...)

 

Am I misunderstanding the phrase "deliver mail locally"? Not sure I follow your response in that context.

Chris

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## Dralnu

 *nrosier wrote:*   

>  *Dralnu wrote:*   Can postfix deliver mail locally w/o having to bounce it from another server? 
> 
> Be carefull when doing that. I've noticed that a lot of dynamic address from ISP are on RBL (because of botnets etc...)

 

Huh? I want to email myslef on my machine w/o having to touch my modem, ie deliver my mail locally w/o needing the internet at all...

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