[KLUG Members] exim? postfix? why not?

[Adam Williams]

>>spamassassin is attractive for filtering the flattering ads in our
>>incoming mail. I'm planning to switch the whole family to my mail server
>>when I get this up running. Anyone using it with exim or postfix?
>Depending on how your mail gets delivered to your box will change how
>spamassassin works with sendmail/postfix/qmail/exim.  If you use procmail,
>you can plug it in that way.  I use that currently; it works rather well.
>I set it up for myself and a few coworkers because they were getting such
>large amounts of spam it was getting unmanagable.

If you have alot of users make sure, whatever MDA you use, that you set
your SPAM and/or Virii filters up as milters.  Otherwise you can easily
create the world's slowest e-mail server and artificially high
load-averages.  We're talking >100 users.

>>Anyone here using these MTA's instead of sendmail? Any input for a guy
>>getting ready to run his own mail server and wants to completely avoid
>>any trouble from his ISP because a spammer exploited his server?
>While a few people I know (ahem) would suggest that running sendmail is
>the Mark of the Beast, I haven't found it to be that unmanageable at all.

Are the permissions of your /var/spool/mqueue 666?  If so then, yes. 
But chmod will excise him for you. :)

>Given; in some places, I don't run it as secure as I should - and I'm
>working on that, believe it or not.  In the end, the relative 'security'
>of any mail server depends on how you configure it.  I recently had a
>friend running qmail; turns out he was an open relay.  Oops.

Right;  qmail completely snowed me when I tried it.  You thought the
sendmail documentation was ragged?    The qmail docs make it look
poetical.

>I've tried postfix, but it wouldn't work correctly on my openBSD box.
>I've *tried* to try qmail, but it was such a hassle I decided to give up.
>(and that's saying quite a bit)  So, I invested some time in sendmail, and
>I've found that the cf file is easy to generate and edit, and moreover,
>it's easy to run.  I'm not completely up to snuff on it's current
>vulnerabilities, but I keep a watchful enough of an eye to spot abuse
>within a day or so.

With, 8.12.x by last gripes against sendmail have been solved;  with the
addition of a separate submissions config file.  Configuring via m4 is
actually pretty simple.

I've thought about using postfix (an IBM endorsed product).  But after
about three mail list days of watching people squabble about the correct
way to make it work via LMTP with Cyrus IMAPd (which is really simple in
sendmail) I said "Ok, thanks, bye".