A comparison of Mail Transfer Agents

A comparison of Mail Transfer Agents - Part Two

Posted Aug 31, 2006 18:59 UTC (Thu) by acorliss (subscriber, #3710)
Parent article: A comparison of Mail Transfer Agents - Part Two

The sheer incompetence of these articles are staggering. In fact, your final "matrix" seems to be more emotionally influenced than factually based. How about a row comparing scalability (and provide some actual benchmarks and metrics)? How including scalability in context of mail routing & filtering configuration complexitity?

Giving sendmail a zero for "*sendmail* milter" support is assinine. Giving it a zero for "worried about security" is ludicrous in context of the last several years -- it only makes sense if you are comparing complete histories, and even that's not entirely fair given how much longer a history sendmail than all the others. They learnt all the hard lessons for everyone else.

You gave sendmail a zero on "wanting minimum hassle" even though your own text states that "sendmai works with little or no modification to the default settings"! For that matter, shouldn't that also affect the score for inexperience users?!

Size constraints? Have you looked at the compiled footprint of the other daemons?

Yes, I am a sendmail user. I know it has warts, but I also know I've evaluated several other alternatives and found none of them to have the flexibility and scalability for complex ISP & Enterprise environments.

Your scoring system is inconsistent with even the facts you presented and is utter rubbish.

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A comparison of Mail Transfer Agents - Part Two

Posted Aug 31, 2006 20:00 UTC (Thu) by dmantione (guest, #4640) [Link]

Exactly. I've been maintaining systems with Sendmail, Postfix and Exim,
and after time I slowly came to the conclusion that Sendmail still suits
best. As a Sendmail user I'm the first to agree its configuration file is
spartan. But on the other hand, configuration is a matter of commenting
and uncommenting the right lines in the m4 file, and therefore quite
easy. Now look at master.cf from Postfix. Who understands this?

Now you can argue that for a simple setup you don't need to touch
master.cf, but you do need it if you want to integrate it with a virus
scanner for example, which is often requested these days. Sendmail?
Copy/paste one line from the milter documentation to the m4 file.

The biggest power of Sendmail is IMHO that it is adaptive; its
functionality can be tweaked/enhanced by simple m4 files anoyone can post
on its website, while other MTA's need new releases for such things.