Ideal mail server: qmail or postfix

[Chris Shenton]

James Godwin <james at organicwire.net> writes:

> I was wondering what mail servers fellow ISP are running. I can't decide
> between postfix or qmail.

At one ISP I support, we've been running a qmail-based system with
domain and user virtualization provided by vpopmail, courier-imap, and
sqwebmail. Been solid as a rock. For lists, ezmlm-idx is the best I've
used.

Check www.inter7.org for pointers to the vpopmail stuff. 

I've set up qmail/vpopmail/courier-imap/sqwebmail for other small
customers and never had a complaint, it just works.

For a larger site (2000 people) I'm building something similar but
using qmail-ldap for account provisioning and virtualization instead
of vpopmail.  I will again be using courier-imap and sqwebmail.

One of the big advantages of qmail is its preferred mailbox format
called Maildir.  Each message is stored in a separate file which makes
updates, deletions, scanning for new mail, etc much much faster than a
large flat file.  It's also safe across NFS mounts so you can have a
number of mail servers reading from and delivering to the mailstore at
the same time, without corruption.  This makes it possible to easily
scale a mail system as your users grow: just add more servers.

Qmail, courier-imap, and sqwebmail all understand Maildir so they're a
good combination.