Sendmail or Postfix?

John Summerfield debian at herakles.homelinux.org
Sat Dec 15 23:54:55 UTC 2007


Daniel B. Thurman wrote:

> So my question is:
> 
> Which of the two Email systems are the most secure, that most people
> use and trust, has better control over intrusion and has good AntiSpam
> and AntiVirus support?


Historically, sendmail has had a bad reputation for security, though 
widely used. It's also had a bad reputation for its obscure 
configuration language; look at sendmail.cf and you will fully 
understand that.

postfix was written (by a chap working for IBM, so its pedigree is fine) 
to be compatible with sendmail at the commandline level, to address the 
security concerns and to be easier to configure.

I used sendmail from the beginning[1], back when it had those security 
problems and the obscure configuration language was the only way to 
configure it, on OS/2 and thence to Linux when it was what Red Hat 
shipped on RHL 3.x and 4.x.

I believe its security problems have been addressed, and the m4 macroes 
in the sendmail-cf package make it easier to configure, but postfix 
remains the MTA of choice for many users and is the default in some 
distros including *suse and *ubuntu*.

Debian prefers exim which (I think) is also in Fedora and EL.

If you need to ask, probably postfix is the best to use. Its main 
configuration file is semantically easy for mere mortals to follow and 
all configuration files have good comments.

It's what I use whenever I need to choose: internal machines tend to get 
the vendor's choice with default setuo.


[1] By the beginning, I refer to my experience of internetting, around 
ten years. My first internet-facing server ran RHL 4.2 on a '486. The 
only way my ISP of the time hat to prevent sendmail's public relaying of 
traffic was, once he spotted something, fiddle with his routing table.


Oh, one of sendmail's helpful features was to qualified unqualified 
addresses; I was a client of iinet then, so mail from fred became mail 
from fred at iinet.net.au, even when injected from afar.


-- 

Cheers
John

-- spambait
1aaaaaaa at coco.merseine.nu  Z1aaaaaaa at coco.merseine.nu
-- Advice
http://webfoot.com/advice/email.top.php
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555375

You cannot reply off-list:-)




More information about the fedora-list mailing list