Qmail Support Forum

admin · Site Admin Joined: 21 Jun 2005 Posts: 209

Hi,

I've been using Exim for many years now and started using it because Exim 2.x was in use by people like IS etc.

I now seldom see Exim being used anymore. It seems as if Postfix is currently the SMTP engine of choice. (having replaced qmail)

What are the advantages of Postfix vs Exim?

I've done a search on Google, but it is still not clear to me why Postfix is the "flavour of the month" at the moment.

Thanks

Nico

admin · Site Admin Joined: 21 Jun 2005 Posts: 209

And this might just start YAESW Sad

, any case my advice is sendmail, but let's see ;^)

On Mon, Jun 14, 2004 at 09:56:36AM +0200, x56@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I've been using Exim for many years now and started using it because Exim 2.x was in use by people like IS etc.

Not necesarily ;^)

> I now seldom see Exim being used anymore. It seems as if Postfix is currently the SMTP engine of choice. (having replaced qmail)

You sure??? Or you just haven't noticed that those that use it just doesn't complain or need to seek expert and second opinions???

> What are the advantages of Postfix vs Exim?

YEs.

- Postfix's main.cf "easier" than exim
- postfix master.cf a while to grasp
- exim's exim.conf more powerfull
- exim's "delivery language" quite powerfull
- postfix fine grained control of resources
- exim.conf could be classified as a watered down version of sendmail.cf, but that's a seperate discussion Sad

> I've done a search on Google, but it is still not clear to me why Postfix is the "flavour of the month" at the moment.

perhaps because it's the quickest to get of the ground... and also the easiest
sendmail drop in replcemetn.

Hendrik

admin · Site Admin Joined: 21 Jun 2005 Posts: 209

I have used both, and the biggest advantage I would say is that the documentation is short, straightforward and easy to understand.

Another advantage is that the design of postfix is very elegant - which allows you to do some very powerful stuff. For example, to handle aliasing, you define a "map" to map one email address to another, and "map"s can be flat files, dbs, or LDAP. But, this "map" functionality is not limited to aliases, but to virtually all the config. This has allowed us a standard and straightforward way of keeping every single bit of config in an LDAP server, without the need to change a single line of a config file (apart from the lines pointing it at the LDAP server).

Regards,
Graham