[KLUG Members] exim? postfix? why not?

[Peter Buxton]

On Mon, Dec 09, 2002 at 07:16:15AM -0500, Adam Williams wrote:

> >While I happen to run sendmail as a mail server here. I would like to
> >say some good words about qmail. Everyone who I've ever talked to who
> >has run it has nothing but good things to say about it.
> 
> My impression is that the light of qmail is fading, I haven't seen any
> announcements, etc... in awhile.

It's hard to say if that is qmail development, or if the mailer wars
have quieted down a bit.

> If I were to investigate an alternative at this point it would
> probably be Exim.  Just about every list I'm on has someone who swears
> by it.  But it has problems (currently, said to be fixed in next
> release) working optimally with Cyrus IMAPd.  It requires some little
> shim between it and LMTP.

Well... yes and no. Exim has several transports, including smtp (which
is SMTP, duh, over a socket), appendfile, suitable for mboxes, pipe,
suitable for procmail, and lmtp, which is LMTP over a pipe. I've been
using the latter, using the program socket(1), to go from Exim to Cyrus
lmtpd, which listens on localhost. However, more careful perusal of the
docs shows that you can tell the smtp transport to 'speak' LMTP over a
socket. I just found this out but haven't changed Exim yet (which is
version 3.3). So neither cyrdeliver nor socket are apparently necessary.

IIRC, sendmail's milter filters in 'realtime,' while sendmail is getting
the message, which allows you to issue an SMTP permanent error to the
mailing host in that session. If true, and if usable, then Exim lacks
this ability to bounce mail by almost any conceivable ruleset, as the
filter language doesn't kick in until after mail has been accepted.

-- 
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