Re: Er.... for Sendmail users......

On Thu, 24 Aug 2006, Damien Hull wrote:

> I would agree that my inability to figure out sendmail doesn't make it a
> bad MTA. The company hosting my digitaloverload.net email uses sendmail.
> However, I like the KISS method of administration. Keep everything as
> simple as possible. I don't think sendmail falls into the KISS category .

I agree with you in principle, but disagree in practice. The reason why I
personally despise tools like linuxconf, webmin, etc., is that they make
simple things really simple but they make hard things *really* hard. In a
nutshell there's only so much you can do to simplify something before you
remove capability and flexibility.

> Email servers are becoming very complex. There's the open relay issue,
> spam and viruses etc... It has taken me years to figure out how to setup
> a server that deals with these issues. Sendmails steep learning curve
> justs adds to the complexity. If I remember correctly there were more
> then a few config files I had to look at. How do you keep track of
> what's in which file?

There aren't multiple *config* files, but there are separate map/hash files,
and almost all of them are optional and configurable as well. For that
matter, you can put it all in LDAP, too. When I configure sendmail I edit one
file, the m4 file (which I call sendmail.mc). I run m4 on it and it creates
my config file for me. Now, if I want to relay mail for a domain or redirect
a users mail to another account, yes, you do edit those other files. I
personally am very comfortable with that. Only one type of data goes into
each file.

> I'm not about to say that Postfix is easy. However, it does everything I
> need and the learning curve was one I could handle. Everything you need
> is in one or two config files. I should point out that some of the new
> features require more config files. For simple email systems you don't
> need the new features. It just adds to administration overhead. That's
> my opinion any way.
>
> I think greylisting is making things a lot simpler. No more fancy spam
> filtering. I still use SpamAssassin though.

Greylisting is a valuable technique. But on my servers where I manage
thousands of accounts I still have to do spam filtering. RBLs and greylisting
saves me only about 60% of what my traffic would be.

But if you're really paranoid about your bandwidth and you don't want to get
stuck with a bunch of undeliverable "no spam here" bounce messages you need to
use milters. Postfix does finally have it, from what I understand, and being
able to generate SMTP errors during the SMTP transaction (and thereby sticking
the connecting server with the bounce/error message) is a huge advantage.
Doing your content & virus filtering after the fact via procmail is not an
efficient way of doing things.

> When talking to clients about email I recommend they have someone else
> do it for them. Find a hosting company that provides the features you
> want/need and call it a day. If they have to have email in house I stick
> with the simple setup. Postfix!

Each to their own. I would recommend for career growth purposes that everyone
in IT learn sendmail. Just about every proprietary UNIX comes with it as well
as the free ones, and I can't see any other MTA dethroning it as the industry
standard in the next five years. At some point you will have to deal with it.
Installing alternatives isn't always an option.

         --Arthur Corliss
           Bolverk's Lair -- http://arthur.corlissfamily.org/
           Digital Mages -- http://www.digitalmages.com/
           "Live Free or Die, the Only Way to Live" -- NH State Motto
---------
To unsubscribe, send email to <aklug-request@aklug.org>
with 'unsubscribe' in the message body.
Received on Thu Aug 24 11:15:28 2006