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[dt at xr7.org]

On Thu, 31 Jul 2003, mike neuliep wrote:
> I've run sendmail on the box for years.  My green and highly intelligent
> partner wants to replace it with qmail.  On technical grounds I've not
> really found a good reason to not switch.  A flame war wasn't what I was
> intending -- I was hoping to find out is sendmail really better suited for
> an ISP environment?  Suitability is a big issue with me.  User empowerment

As has been stated here already, qmail (and postfix and others) seem to be 
better able to handle rather large and sudden loads than sendmail.  My 
experience using qmail as an inbound gateway for >4000 users bears this 
out, but htat was back before SPAM overwhelmed regular traffic for volume, 
too.

> is a great concern too and qmail seems to do a little bit better job of
> empowering their users to manage their own domain mailboxes.  However, I
> really don't want to totally relearn an MTA after I've invested so much
> into sendmail after all these years.  Keeping these gauges in mind,
> suitability for an ISP and user empowerment is qmail a better candidate
> then sendmail?  I am hoping to find out what other people have concluded
> about this question.

I decided that the investment in sendmail wasn't wasted because I still 
use it on many of the internal systems at work pointing to the qmail 
gateway.  I'm not a sendmail rules guru, but I know my way around the m4 
files well enough.  I didn't figure that was the same investment-wise as 
writing custon rules for all sorts of stuff, etc.

Qmail has a neat way to off-load the setting up of additional addresses 
for local users.  so does sendmail.  they're different, but they both can 
get the job done well with a litle bit of scripting help here and there.

I absolutely hate the way djb has left qmail to rot.  The whole patch 
nightmare has left me looking seriously at postfix for the next email 
server I build.  I've made qmail sing and do things that it never should 
have been able to do, (all in shell and Perl scripts!) but keeping on 
top of the patching is just not worth it.

Botom line: if you only do SMTP mail, I'd pick qmail (or postfix, etc) 
over sendmail.  If you're also still doing UUCP, Bitnet, X.400 or 
who-knows-whatelse (other than VMS stuff), pick sendmail.

dt

-- 
Dean Troyer
dt at xr7.org