A comparison of Mail Transfer Agents

A comparison of Mail Transfer Agents - Part Two

Posted Sep 1, 2006 10:58 UTC (Fri) by Tet (subscriber, #5433)
Parent article: A comparison of Mail Transfer Agents - Part Two

What a terrible article. Design goals of sendmail are to be backwardly compatible? Strange, I always thought the design goal was to send mail to anyone, anywhere. The anti-sendmail bias is just too hard to stomach. Yes, sendmail has historically had various problems. But recent (and by recent, I mean in the last decade) versions have largely fixed them.

The reason I use sendmail is that it lets me do anything I want in terms of sending mail. That's a feature I haven't found in any other MTA. For various historical reasons, I have a fairly complex mail setup, and need to route mail based on arbitrary features of the message (sender address, and even sometimes content of the message body). Sendmail lets me do that.

It just seems that the whole point of this article was to plug the author's preferred MTA, rather than provide an unbiased overview.

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A comparison of Mail Transfer Agents - Part Two

Posted Sep 1, 2006 23:03 UTC (Fri) by dwmw2 (subscriber, #2063) [Link]

"The reason I use sendmail is that it lets me do anything I want in terms of sending mail. That's a feature I haven't found in any other MTA. For various historical reasons, I have a fairly complex mail setup, and need to route mail based on arbitrary features of the message (sender address, and even sometimes content of the message body). Sendmail lets me do that.

Actually, that's the reason I run Exim, too. The ACLs are flexible enough that I can trigger rejection (and hence also greylisting) based on whatever criteria I like.

Mail routing is similarly versatile -- for example, some of my domains route mail according to the contents of TXT records in DNS, because when I went to set up a shared database between the mail servers I realised I already had one. Implementing that in Exim was trivial, and the config files are actually readable, even when they do things as bizarre as mine.