sendmail easier than qmail? [LWN.net]

sendmail easier than qmail?

Posted Aug 31, 2006 9:32 UTC (Thu) by pkolloch (subscriber, #21709)
Parent article: A comparison of Mail Transfer Agents - Part Two

Alright, this was years ago, when I was about to administer my first MTA server, it was setup to run sendmail. I spent a considerable amount of time to understand the elaborate configuration, but was unable to understand it fully. I decided to convert to qmail. It took some time to get used to all its principles, yet after the effort I felt that I understood the configuration completely.

This is a very good feeling I have not attained with any other MTA in a reasonable time frame. Since I was a complete newbie to MTA configuration, I would argue that qmail is considerably easier to setup.

That said the license restrictions of qmail make it an odd choice.

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qmail's *too* simple

Posted Aug 31, 2006 17:16 UTC (Thu) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link]

Sure, qmail is very easy to understand, but that's partly because it just can't do most of the stuff I'd want to have in a reasonable mailer. (And no, adding the exact same line to 1000+ .qmail-FOO files doesn't help WRT "reasonable".)

I happen to like Exim's configuration syntax. It's reasonably clear, has sensible defaults, the documentation is understandable and seems to be complete, and it has a filter language with a rich-enough syntax that actually makes sense (as opposed to qmail's, which doesn't really do anything except distinguish program exit codes -- or things like procmail, which are frankly dangerous).

The only serious gripe I have about Exim is that AFAIK it *still* cannot encapsulate bounce emails in MIME. If you get a bounce from an Exim mailer because you mistyped an address, extracting the thing and re-sending it is a nontrivial exercise. With MIME and a MIME-enabled mailer, this becomes child's play by comparison -- at least with mutt. ;-)

I don't know how the other mailers handle this.