One of the biggest differences between Postfix and qmail is that Postfix comes out of the box (more readily) configured for anti-spam functionality. A big feature (for us) is that Postfix will immediately reject messages targeted at accounts that do not exist. It appears to immediately disconnect and short circuit the connection.
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As part of our platform rebuilding we have decided to switch to to Postfix. This was a suggestion I have heard quite a bit. I also considered sendmail but was concerned with how daunting a task it would be to configure. The config files appear very cryptic. I realize this has become easier, but we really wanted to move to something as simple as possible to administrate.
Postfix is light years ahead of qmail. For starters, it’s ready to plug right into FC6 as a yum update. No need to download and compile a long chain of sources as in qmail. And there is even a handy little switcher in fedora that switches the system from sendmail to postfix ’system-switch-mail-nox’. This takes care of starting and stopping the process on startup and other stuff. Nice and easy.
The config file for postfix is easy enough. /etc/postfix/main.cf holds most of the config stuff. I also utilized the virtual alias domains and accounts features with two other files which are utilized as hash lookups.
We have been a qmail shop since 1997 and I for one am fed up with qmail. Good god it’s been stuck at 1.03 since I started using it and now has a myriad of patches. It can only be installed from source, and there are quite a few sources required. I had difficulty getting the patches I wanted to work. Support has always been poor and documentation weak (except for the excellent http://www.lifewithqmail.org/). When we began rebuilding our unix platform from the bottom up we decided to bail on our old friend qmail.
One interesting thing: In the last year or so we began to be targeted with massive amounts of spam being sent to nonexisitant accounts at all of our domains (we have about 10). My haunch is that the spammers were actually counting on the bounces that our server produced to send spam. I tried a few times to configure the validrcptto patch to stop this but was unable to get it to work. The amount of bounces went from almost zero to hundreds or thousands a day.
Good riddence to qmail!
I have been working with the latest release of Fedora (core 6). The install is simple enough from one DVD. The system uses yum for updating which is a nice way for updates and installs. I had issues setting up my nvidia card with the latest nvidia driver, but fortunately I found a site called http://rpm.livna.org/Â that had simple rpms that installed and ran without a hitch. Prior to finding these rpm’s I wasted a lot of time trying to compile the source code myself.