Postfix: A Secure and Easy-to-Use MTA

BSD Forums writes "On March 3rd, 2003, Internet Security Systems, in cooperation with the Department of Homeland Security, issued a warning regarding a hole found in Sendmail. The warning, echoed by CERT, warned system admins that any version lower than 8.12.8 was vulnerable to a serious root exploit. Sendmail has a long history of security holes, most of which have been thoroughly documented on security sites. While Sendmail runs half the mail servers in the world, there are smaller and easier-to-use mail transfer agents (MTAs). Network administrator Glenn Graham demonstrates how Postfix gives you most of the power with a fraction of the pain."

Comments

MTAs for desktop/client installations

[Florian]

For running an MTA on a desktop/client PC, I strongly recommend solutions like Nullmailer or, for computers with permanent Internet connectivity, ssmtp. Both work as just local gateways/bouncers to a remote SMTP server; they don't open any network ports and thus prevent remote exploits/attacks/spam relaying by design. Nullmailer offers local spooling (important for dialup connections) while ssmtp bounces everything immediately to the smarthost. Both are very small (ssmtp: 22k, nullmailer-send: 25k), ridiculously simple to configure even for people with low administration skills, both provide sendmail-compatibility to work with MUAs like mutt.

(Offtopic: A similarly nice, elegant solution for desktop/clients PC printing is pdq, which unlike lpd and cups runs only as a local spooler without opening a network port, and is lean (65k), dead-simple and functional. With nullmailer/ssmtp & pdq, I managed to close all ports (except of course SSH) on my two desktop PCs under Debian GNU/Linux without any firewalling. AFAIK, Debian is the only OS offering all the aforementioned pieces of software as part of its main distribution.)

Re:Its look like Qmail Vs Postfix war

[slushpupie]

We handle roughly 1.5million pieces of mail daily, and found major performance problems with qmail. In particular, qmail would tend to start slowing down, for no apparent reason, which would make the queue size even larger; and well, it was a slipery slope. We found by switching to postfix not only did we eliminate the issues, but since this is a cluster of mail servers, the postconf command made admining the boxes much easier.

(this was on stock redhat 7.2 installs with scsi raid 5 disk arrays)