Top mail servers

[Srivastava, Abhay]

Folks,
    I am in the process of hosting a site on Tomcat on Ubuntu. I will be
also running a mail server. As per your experience which are the top
mail servers? While googling I came to know these names :
 
Sendmail
Postfix
 
 
I would appreciate if you can give your inputs.
 
Thanks,
abhay

[Alan Chaney]

Have you looked at exim? (www.exim.org).
sendmail is rather dated.

I have no experience of postfix.

I have set up two mailservers with exim. The documentation is thorough,
but setting up a public production mailserver is not for the
faint-hearted. Exim is supposed to be significantly easier to configure
than sendmail.

You will also probably need a POP or IMAP server. I found dovecot to be
very good. I also implemented a dspam spam filter. Not for beginners,
but once you get it going properly it absolutely wipes all the noddy PC
spam filters off the map.

Ubuntu has a 'distribution' of exim, dovecot, postfix etc. However, you
will still need to understand how they work which is a far more
time-consuming task than the actual physical installation.

HTH


Srivastava, Abhay wrote:

> Folks,
>     I am in the process of hosting a site on Tomcat on Ubuntu. I will be
> also running a mail server. As per your experience which are the top
> mail servers? While googling I came to know these names :
>  
> Sendmail
> Postfix
>  
>  
> I would appreciate if you can give your inputs.
>  
> Thanks,
> abhay
>
>
> !DSPAM:47ed0b5181291562881678!
>

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[Peter Crowther]

> From: Alan Chaney [mailto:alan@...]
> Exim is supposed to be significantly easier to
> configure than sendmail.

[Beware: opinion ahead!]

This is not difficult.  Untangling the Gordian knot, blindfold and with no sharp objects in reach, is easier than getting a correct sendmail.cf... most sendmail admins I know got their initial config from another kind-hearted admin who sent them a file that more-or-less worked.

                - Peter

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[Christopher Schultz-2]

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Abhay,

Srivastava, Abhay wrote:
| Sendmail
| Postfix

There's also exim (typically installed on Debian Linux and related
distros) and qmail. In spite of qmail's many non-standard configuration,
installation, and operation choices, it's a lean, mean, mail-sending
machine.

- -chris
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[Mark H. Wood]

Another happy multiple Exim user here.  I migrated from Smail, and
also operated an MMDF descendant called PMDF for several years, so
that may explain my preference.

I would suggest investigating several different MUAs and deciding
which one best balances the capability you need with the pain of
configuring it.  Properly setting up an MUA, *any* MUA, is not simple.

--
Mark H. Wood, Lead System Programmer   mwood@...
Typically when a software vendor says that a product is "intuitive" he
means the exact opposite.

[Srivastava, Abhay]

Thanks a lot Guys.
So is "Exim" better than "Sendmail" in terms of robustness and faster
service?


Abhay Srivastava
Reference Architecture
Shared Services and Architecture | Smith Barney Technology | CitiGroup
GWM
(212)  657 - 4617

-----Original Message-----
From: Mark H. Wood [mailto:mwood@...]
Sent: Friday, March 28, 2008 2:18 PM
To: users@...
Subject: Re: Top mail servers

Another happy multiple Exim user here.  I migrated from Smail, and also
operated an MMDF descendant called PMDF for several years, so that may
explain my preference.

I would suggest investigating several different MUAs and deciding which
one best balances the capability you need with the pain of configuring
it.  Properly setting up an MUA, *any* MUA, is not simple.

--
Mark H. Wood, Lead System Programmer   mwood@...
Typically when a software vendor says that a product is "intuitive" he
means the exact opposite.


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[Srivastava, Abhay]

Has anyone tried Apache James ? It's a java mail server.


Abhay Srivastava
Reference Architecture
Shared Services and Architecture | Smith Barney Technology | CitiGroup
GWM
(212)  657 - 4617

-----Original Message-----
From: Srivastava, Abhay [GWM]
Sent: Friday, March 28, 2008 3:48 PM
To: Tomcat Users List
Subject: RE: Top mail servers

Thanks a lot Guys.
So is "Exim" better than "Sendmail" in terms of robustness and faster
service?


Abhay Srivastava
Reference Architecture
Shared Services and Architecture | Smith Barney Technology | CitiGroup
GWM
(212)  657 - 4617

-----Original Message-----
From: Mark H. Wood [mailto:mwood@...]
Sent: Friday, March 28, 2008 2:18 PM
To: users@...
Subject: Re: Top mail servers

Another happy multiple Exim user here.  I migrated from Smail, and also
operated an MMDF descendant called PMDF for several years, so that may
explain my preference.

I would suggest investigating several different MUAs and deciding which
one best balances the capability you need with the pain of configuring
it.  Properly setting up an MUA, *any* MUA, is not simple.

--
Mark H. Wood, Lead System Programmer   mwood@...
Typically when a software vendor says that a product is "intuitive" he
means the exact opposite.


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[Andrew Miehs]

On 28/03/2008, at 8:47 PM, Srivastava, Abhay wrote:
> Thanks a lot Guys.
> So is "Exim" better than "Sendmail" in terms of robustness and faster
> service?


It very much depends on what you want to do.

I am a big postfix fan - exim is supposedly also great.
qmail is also very good.

But these are only MTAs.

Do your users also need to read the mails - or is this only for  
forwarding messages?

Andrew

[Carl Vorster]

I've been using Apache James for a couple of years very successfully and am
very happy with it.

For plain mail delivery it's probably on par with the rest, but if you want
to do more than simple mail, it's a winner.

You can imbed it in tomcat if you want, run it standalone, use a db for mail
storage, spooling etc etc

You can also create mailets, which allows you to add your own logic to the
mail process; his allows you to use email as a simple transport for anything
you want. I use it extensively to convert emails to sms's, processing
attachments, even updating user profiles if emails bounce.

It's really cool.

Carl




-----Original Message-----
From: Srivastava, Abhay [mailto:abhay.srivastava@...]
Sent: Friday, March 28, 2008 9:51 PM
To: Tomcat Users List
Subject: RE: Top mail servers

Has anyone tried Apache James ? It's a java mail server.


Abhay Srivastava
Reference Architecture
Shared Services and Architecture | Smith Barney Technology | CitiGroup
GWM
(212)  657 - 4617

-----Original Message-----
From: Srivastava, Abhay [GWM]
Sent: Friday, March 28, 2008 3:48 PM
To: Tomcat Users List
Subject: RE: Top mail servers

Thanks a lot Guys.
So is "Exim" better than "Sendmail" in terms of robustness and faster
service?


Abhay Srivastava
Reference Architecture
Shared Services and Architecture | Smith Barney Technology | CitiGroup
GWM
(212)  657 - 4617

-----Original Message-----
From: Mark H. Wood [mailto:mwood@...]
Sent: Friday, March 28, 2008 2:18 PM
To: users@...
Subject: Re: Top mail servers

Another happy multiple Exim user here.  I migrated from Smail, and also
operated an MMDF descendant called PMDF for several years, so that may
explain my preference.

I would suggest investigating several different MUAs and deciding which
one best balances the capability you need with the pain of configuring
it.  Properly setting up an MUA, *any* MUA, is not simple.

--
Mark H. Wood, Lead System Programmer   mwood@...
Typically when a software vendor says that a product is "intuitive" he
means the exact opposite.


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[Ronald Klop]

On Fri Mar 28 16:11:21 CET 2008 Tomcat Users List <users@...> wrote:

> Folks,
> I am in the process of hosting a site on Tomcat on Ubuntu. I will be
> also running a mail server. As per your experience which are the top
> mail servers? While googling I came to know these names :
>
> Sendmail
> Postfix
>
>
> I would appreciate if you can give your inputs.
>
> Thanks,
> abhay

IMHO postfix is the most easy. (I've run qmail, exim and postfix in an environment with a couple of thousand users.)
But before you install any mailserver read about 'open relay smtp'. There is a lot about it on the internet.

Ronald.

[Steffen Heil]

Hi

> I would suggest investigating several different MUAs and
> deciding which one best balances the capability you need with
> the pain of configuring it.  Properly setting up an MUA,
> *any* MUA, is not simple.

I agree with this, if you replace MUA with MTA...


However, my personal preference is definitely exim 4.x.

It's very fast, relyable and flexible.
The configuration language is even turing complete...

Be aware, that it's initial configuration may be a huge step.
On debian/ubuntu you get a multi-file configuration by default, which is
good, if the package is updated.

However I found it more easy to do administration using a single-file
config. (you may start copying the auto-generated config from the multi-file
system to /etc/exim4/exim4.conf.)


Regards,
  Steffen

[Alan Chaney]

Steffen Heil wrote:

> It's very fast, relyable and flexible.

Agreed.

> The configuration language is even turing complete...
>
> Be aware, that it's initial configuration may be a huge step.
> On debian/ubuntu you get a multi-file configuration by default, which is
> good, if the package is updated.
>
> However I found it more easy to do administration using a single-file
> config. (you may start copying the auto-generated config from the multi-file
> system to /etc/exim4/exim4.conf.)
>

Heartily agreed! I messed around with the multi-file administration
scheme for 2 or 3 days and then decided that what I really needed was to
understand how exim worked. Having done that, it was easier just to edit
one file. Phil Hazel's book is very useful. After all, he wrote exim.

HTH

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