Which mail server is the best for me?

Joshua Lewis joshua.lewis at prideindesign.com
Sun Apr 3 10:31:22 PDT 2005


Gosh could you have picked a harder question? That is like saying Blondes,
Brunets or Red Heads?

You will have to read up about several MTA¹s and figure out what suites your
needs. It will take a good few hours of reading and if you are anything like
me with a wife job and three kids then time is precious. So to try and help
you get on your way don¹t use sendmail. I am partial to Postfix although
with that said I have never used anything else. I did several days worth of
reading and Postfix was my choice due to it¹s ease of use, flexibility and
security.

Ease of Use:
    If you are only receiving e-mail for FQDN of your box (/etc/rc.conf)
then right after you have finished installing Postfix you are ready to go.
It uses sensible defaults and is a  breeze to work with. At that point you
will be using local system accounts and MBOX format. You ought to read about
the benefits and drawbacks or both to decide if that is really what you
want. MBOX is easy enough to change however changing your logins to use
something other then the local /etc/masster.passwd database takes some extra
finagling. Again the how toos are a great help.

Flexibility 
    Now with that said I am hosting e-mail for several of my web customers.
So I wanted to set up a MySQL back end to manage the domains instead of
using text files.

Security
    I also wanted to add additional security and installed TLS and SASL. As
well as quota¹s so my users don¹t suck up all my disk space. So I took it to
the next level and it took quite a bit more time to setup.

So if you want a MTA that will be a breeze to setup but can have the
flexibility to use more features you can shake a stick at while maintaining
the KISS process (Keep it simple stupid). Then Postfix is a good choice.

There are A LOT of how too¹s on postfix out on the net. Take a look at the
documentation on the postfix website postfix.org. The how too¹s and the
postfix documentation are separate pages on their site.


More information about the freebsd-questions mailing list