[plug] Mail Delivery options

[Steve Vertigan]

Trevor Phillips wrote:

> I'd like to get away from sendmail, and also change from cyrus to the UW imap
> server, and while I'm at it, gain some extra functionality. I'm considering
> switching to "qmail" for delivery, as someone illustrated that it can easily be
> used for wildcard mail aliases. Apart from this, is "qmail" an all-round decent
> mail deliverer? Are there any Gotcha's? Does anyone have any other recommended
> ones over qmail (and if so, why)?

Don't know about gotchas but if you're looking at qmail you might want
to look at courier imap, it works off maildir's natively.  I've been
using it instead of cyrus for a couple of months now and am pretty happy
with it.  You can also look at using ezmlm for the mailing lists which I
find easier to use from a subscribers point of view and very
quick/robust.  I've switched two ISPs to qmail and set up a few soho
gateway boxes with it and for my money you can't go past it.  What I
really like about it is it's modular nature makes it easy to add on
front-ends like web-interfaces and set up things like virtual users
under one uid.  For one box I had all the pop3 users authenticating out
of a htpasswd file and it was as simple as replacing the checkpassword
program with a 10-line perl script. :-)

The only serious competitor to qmail would be postfix and I haven't
really used it enough to say anything good or bad about it.  They're
both considered secure and have never had an exploit (to my knowledge)
but due to being around longer and things like the $500 offered to the
first person to find a security hole in qmail or the $1000 offered by
another group, qmail has had more exposure.

A good place to look is the unofficial qmail page at www.qmail.org which
is maintained by users and contains unofficial patches and add-ons which
give you a pretty good idea of what you can do with it.

Although speaking of gotchas if you're going to be using reiserfs you
might want to look at http://www.jedi.claranet.fr/qmail-tuning.html - it
mentions an obscure bug with link() that doesn't occur under bsd but can
under linux.

Regards,
Steve
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