Re: email questions

From: Adam bultman <adamb@glaven.org>
Date: Fri Jul 01 2005 - 10:04:10 AKDT

Matthew Schumacher wrote:

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>>Bob Crosby
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I've removed all context to this message, so: Matthew was extolling the
value in having your own mail server, and giving his thoughts on
sendmail and qmail.

I ran my own mailserver, and hosted all my mail for several years. I
think I started hosting my own mail when I was on an ISDN line, and
after that hosted it on my cable modem for at least a year and a half
after that.

I loved running my own mailserver for the reasons Matthew gave: you have
complete control. Especially when I worked at home, I could use the
grinding of my hard drives (spamassassin scanning a piece of mail) as a
replacement for the audible 'ding'. My mail was always there, I was
the only user, and it was fast,fast,fast. I configured sendmail with
UW/IMAP, SMTP AUTH and Cyrus SASL. It was a blast to spend the time to
set it up, and really cool to know that my system was pretty much
bulletproof. I could configure and have everything compiled about as
fast as it took me to pull the data down off the 'net.

However, I also love not running my own mailserver. I use Thunderbird
for spam scanning now (which is about 99% effective, with a handful of
false positives a day - but I don't care, it's always mailing list
stuff). I don't have to worry about my power going out when I'm gone, I
don't have to worry about having a static IP, I don't have to worry
about losing mail, disk failures, system slowness, etc.

I've been on a hosting setup (www.agathongroup.com) that some friends of
mine run, and I couldn't be happier. I think I've had one mail outage
for a few minutes in the past year, period.

Bottom Line: If you don't mind spending the extra admin time and
fretting about a personal server, host your own mail. If you don't have
much time to spare, or don't want to spend time outside of work
tinkering with a server that's acting up, then you might want to go hosted.

-

As far as the mail *daemon*, I'm afriad I only have experience with
Sendmail (~3 years) and qmail (~2 years). I liked the fact that
sendmail lets you set up everything in mc file. However, at the time I
was also recompiling sendmail for massive holes every month or so. But
I was able to tease out SMTP AUTH and SASL (and I still get the
occasional mail from my reports on other listserves). It's rather big
and slow (in comparison with qmail!) but if you're on your own box,
you've got control of how fast your system is (I ran sendmail and 'the
works' on a 233 MHz alpha for a while - so no worries). Qmail is much
faster than sendmail because of the way it's broken down, and once you
get the hang of DJB's blundering numbskullery, you'll be fine. I've come
to love the patching and the ability to drop in a new SMTP daemon (like
qpsmtpd) that has more abilities than the normal one. Qmail with
vmailmgr, qmail-scanner and maildrop is pretty cool. Like I said, you
can drop in replacements by patching or declaring env variables.

Oh: And qmail is a *pain* to set up the first time. All the scripts,
dang... But it's worth it.

(FWIW: My sendmail servers at my last job could crank out maybe 60,000
pieces of mail an hour, full tilt - while a similar qmail server can
crank out about 250,000)

And finally: Don't use mbox format, use maildirs. Much easier to manage.

Adam
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Received on Fri Jul 1 10:04:59 2005

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