[Dovecot] Ok, I've given up

[Phil Howard]

On Thu, Jun 17, 2010 at 04:46, Chuck McManis <chuck.mcmanis at gmail.com> wrote:

> So SMTP hasn't changed much in 30 years ;-) I'd be interested in what you
> consider a 'modern' MTA. I've looked pretty thoroughly at sendmail, postfix,
> and qmail and of the three qmail is fairly reliable. Not sure what makes a
> particular MTA more 'vulnerable' to spam. I don't run an open relay and I
> generally find barracuda central a decent rbl source. Between that and using
> tcpserver to simply not accept connections from zombies spam hasn't really
> been an issue.

I abandoned sendmail many years ago and haven't looked back.  I tried
qmail and postfix, and was a lot happier with postfix.  I overlooked
exim at the time, but from what little I've seen and heard, it should
be up there with postfix, making for a tough choice if you didn't have
anything to bias your choice (like having used one of them already for
a few years).

I prefer to avoid DJB's "the code is the comment" code because it's
too hard to maintain.  Hard to maintain == risk of breaking it, IMHO.
But I do like DJB's CDB concept.


> Provide a system that gives shell and email service to a dozen users, hosts
> perhaps 15 or so mailing lists, provides DNS for 20 - 30 machines.
>
> Preferred OS and what makes it the one you choose?
> Preferred MTA and what makes it the one you choose?
> Name service?
> ssh implementation?
> Hardware?

I'd prefer Slackware or OpenBSD based on the simplicity.  But I
do/have run some things on CentOS, Debian, Fedora, FreeBSD and Ubuntu,
for various reasons where those get me going faster, or have what I
need, including my current mail server on Ubuntu (for a faster "get a
startup started" where needs were not well defined), which will be
migrated to Slackware, maybe in early '11.

Postfix is my 1st choice due to experience, but Exim seems to be a
fine next choice.

My authoritative DNS runs on NSD3, and my caching DNS runs on BIND9.
They are run on different IPs on the same machines (5, later to be 6,
instances of each).  Local hidden zones are on BIND9, but I don't have
to do a split horizon to have it.

OpenSSH.

x86_64 machines because it's COTS.  The mail server is running on a
pair of 500GB drives in RAID1.  Next machine will probably be more
drives and 1TB each.  I'm looking for a RAID controller than can do a
3-way or 4-way mirror.  I also rsync everything to another box every
hour and working on setting up a delta archive from that backup.