mail server setup questions

[Bob Johnson]

On 9/5/07, Andrey Shuvikov <mr.hyro at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm trying to set up a home mailserver with imap/web access. But I was
> going to use exim. Several people mentioned postfix here, but nobody
> named exim. Is it a matter of personal preference or is exim not
> suitable for this task?
>

It's most definitely a matter of personal preference. I lean toward
Exim or Courier. Exim is highly customizable, but the price you pay
for that is a steep learning curve when you start looking at
customization. Courier isn't as flexible, but can do anything most
people are likely to want from a mail server by just setting the
appropriate configuration values. And if you just must have more
complexity, you can use procmail to do local delivery for Courier.

FWIW I use Courier at home and Exim at work. We replaced Qmail (yech!)
with Exim at work in part because we needed its customizability.  The
only real reason for me to switch to Exim at home would be to reduce
the number of tools I'm dealing with. Courier has the advantage of
having everything (smtp, pop, imap, and webmail servers) all
distributed as one package, other than the host web server for the
webmail component.

Whatever you do, please don't use Qmail. I don't want any more
blowback spam than I already get.

In case I haven't made myself clear, I despise Qmail with a passion. I
suppose it is suitable for people who like puzzles (as in "What
patches do I need to make this do something useful?" or "What
third-party tool do I need to make sense out of these awful log
files?") and who don't mind inflicting lots of unnecessary secondary
spam on the rest of the world.  Yes, I know there are _supposed_ to be
patches that fix that problem, but (a) the one I've seen in action
doesn't work very well, and (b) you shouldn't need to apply
third-party patches to your mail server to make it do what it is
supposed to do in the first place.

- Bob