We are currently running an old mailman instance and am planning to bring up the newest version of mailman and migrate to it. Current system uses sendmail. Since I now have a chance to change things, what is the best mail server to run on my mailman box? It will be talking to an exchange 2010 frontend server (current mailman system is doing that now). I can install sendmail or go with postfix or ??? This is running on a debian box.
Bruce Harrison UT Martin
It seems the 3 most popular MTAs are sendmail, Exim, and Postfix. All do the job well if you're running just a standard install of mailman without much fuss.
sendmail is still widely used, and if I were you, I'd just stick with what works unless you have you a particular need that sendmail wasn't filling.
Sajan Parikh On 03/26/2014 04:19 PM, Bruce Harrison wrote:
We are currently running an old mailman instance and am planning to bring up the newest version of mailman and migrate to it. Current system uses sendmail. Since I now have a chance to change things, what is the best mail server to run on my mailman box? It will be talking to an exchange 2010 frontend server (current mailman system is doing that now). I can install sendmail or go with postfix or ??? This is running on a debian box.
Bruce Harrison UT Martin
Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/sajan%40parikh.io
Sajan Parikh writes:
sendmail is still widely used, and if I were you, I'd just stick with what works unless you have you a particular need that sendmail wasn't filling.
+1 with caveat:
Exim and Postfix both have recipes for working with Mailman 3. It seems likely to me that it "won't be hard" to get Mailman 3 and Sendmail to work and play well together -- but nobody has done it yet.
On Mar 27, 2014, at 05:26 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
Exim and Postfix both have recipes for working with Mailman 3. It seems likely to me that it "won't be hard" to get Mailman 3 and Sendmail to work and play well together -- but nobody has done it yet.
It's certainly the intent of the project to interoperate with any FLOSS MTA.
It should be rather trivial to integrate MM3 with any MTA that supports LMTP delivery (currently the only supported method) which includes Postfix and Exim, and should include Sendmail afaik. For the most part, not much needs to be done on the Mailman side, so it's mostly getting your MTA configured correctly. Contributions welcome of course!
-Barry
--On 27. März 2014 09:22:02 -0400 Barry Warsaw barry@list.org wrote:
On Mar 27, 2014, at 05:26 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
Exim and Postfix both have recipes for working with Mailman 3. It seems likely to me that it "won't be hard" to get Mailman 3 and Sendmail to work and play well together -- but nobody has done it yet.
It's certainly the intent of the project to interoperate with any FLOSS MTA.
It should be rather trivial to integrate MM3 with any MTA that supports LMTP delivery (currently the only supported method) which includes Postfix and Exim, and should include Sendmail afaik. For the most part, not much needs to be done on the Mailman side, so it's mostly getting your MTA configured correctly. Contributions welcome of course!
We are a Sendmail shop, so perhaps I can find the time to help with that. It does support LMTP delivery, so that's not an issue.
Cheers Sebastian
Thanks to all who replied. Since I've used sendmail and have limited experience with it, I decided to go with that. Less variables in the mix! :)
Anyway, proceeded with the install and got to make install, which failed with Permission denied for the mkdir commands. I'm running from a non-root userid who has a membership in the mailman group. The directory /usr/local/mailman has rws privs for the mailman group (but is owned by root). Do I need to do a sudo make install or am I missing some type of privilege setting?
Bruce UTM
On 03/27/2014 02:40 PM, Bruce Harrison wrote:
Anyway, proceeded with the install and got to make install, which failed with Permission denied for the mkdir commands. I'm running from a non-root userid who has a membership in the mailman group. The directory /usr/local/mailman has rws privs for the mailman group (but is owned by root). Do I need to do a sudo make install or am I missing some type of privilege setting?
Yes, I think you may need to 'sudo make install'. Either that or chown the /usr/local/mailman directory to the user you're running as.
On 03/27/14 04:26, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
Sajan Parikh writes:
sendmail is still widely used, and if I were you, I'd just stick with what works unless you have you a particular need that sendmail wasn't filling.
+1 with caveat:
Exim and Postfix both have recipes for working with Mailman 3. It seems likely to me that it "won't be hard" to get Mailman 3 and Sendmail to work and play well together -- but nobody has done it yet.
I have it working fine. I recently replaced a very old implementation of sendmail and Mailman on Solaris with a new one on CentOS 6. When I did so, I used the POSTFIX_ALIAS_CMD mechanism to automatically process the aliases. See: https://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-users/2004-June/037518.html
In mm_cfg.py:
MTA='Postfix'
POSTFIX_ALIAS_CMD = '/usr/bin/sudo /etc/mail/import-mailman-aliases'
/etc/mail/import-mailman-aliases contains:
#! /bin/sh
/bin/cp /etc/mailman/aliases /etc/mail/mailman.aliases
/usr/bin/newaliases
In /etc/sudoers.d/mailman:
Cmnd_Alias IMPORT_MAILMAN_ALIASES = /etc/mail/import-mailman-aliases
apache ALL= NOPASSWD: IMPORT_MAILMAN_ALIASES
mailman ALL= NOPASSWD: IMPORT_MAILMAN_ALIASES
Defaults!IMPORT_MAILMAN_ALIASES !requiretty
In the sendmail.mc file I changed:
define(ALIAS_FILE',/etc/aliases')dnl
to:
define(ALIAS_FILE',/etc/aliases,/etc/mail/mailman.aliases')dnl
so that the Mailman aliases would be in a separate file.
Warning: You need to have Mailman 2.1.15 or better (or patch it). See this bug: https://bugs.launchpad.net/mailman/+bug/266408. A fix is here: http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~mailman-coders/mailman/2.1/revision/1291 (Thanks to Mark Sapiro)
I stayed with sendmail because I am using LDAP for aliases and routing and I did not want to figure out how to do it with Postfix. My one exposure to Postfix was a disaster trying to fix the email services on our marketing department's web server at a hosting provider that did not support sendmail. Perhaps with time, I could have made it work for our mail server, but the duckling syndrome may have set in (yes, I still use vi and sometimes ed).
Gary Algier writes:
On 03/27/14 04:26, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
Exim and Postfix both have recipes for working with Mailman 3. It seems likely to me that it "won't be hard" to get Mailman 3 and Sendmail to work and play well together -- but nobody has done it yet.
I have it working fine.
Did you notice I specified Mailman **3**?
Warning: You need to have Mailman 2.1.15 or better (or patch it).
Mailman 3 is not a trivial upgrade from Mailman 2.x.
On 03/26/2014 02:19 PM, Bruce Harrison wrote:
We are currently running an old mailman instance and am planning to bring up the newest version of mailman and migrate to it. Current system uses sendmail. Since I now have a chance to change things, what is the best mail server to run on my mailman box? It will be talking to an exchange 2010 frontend server (current mailman system is doing that now). I can install sendmail or go with postfix or ??? This is running on a debian box.
Disclaimer: I am not an MTA expert. This is all personal opinion based on possibly limited experience.
I would go with either Postfix or Exim. Both integrate well with Mailman; http://www.exim.org/howto/mailman21.html and http://www.list.org/mailman-install/node12.html.
I have used both in Mailman environments, but Exim only in a Mailman development environment, Postfix both in development and on a production server handling both Mailman and other mail.
My impression is that if you want to do esoteric things, it's easier (at least for a coder like me) with Exim's routers and transports than with Postfix, but I've always been able to accomplish whatever I've wanted with Postfix.
I have little experience with sendmail, and while it is possible to hijack Mailman's Postfix integration to use with sendmail, on the whole it seems 'clunkier' to configure, and I see no reason to chose sendmail over Postfix.
I'd be inclined to chose Postfix over Exim simply because Postfix is more popular, and new things (e.g. Mailman 3) tend to be implemented first for Postfix.
On 3/26/2014 3:33 PM, Mark Sapiro wrote:
I'd be inclined to chose Postfix over Exim simply because Postfix is more popular, and new things (e.g. Mailman 3) tend to be implemented first for Postfix.
FWIW, I found postfix to be generally easier to deal with than the others. And the config files don't look like line noise with comments :).
z!
On Wed, Mar 26, 2014 at 09:32:50PM -0700, Carl Zwanzig wrote:
On 3/26/2014 3:33 PM, Mark Sapiro wrote:
I'd be inclined to chose Postfix over Exim simply because Postfix is more popular, and new things (e.g. Mailman 3) tend to be implemented first for Postfix.
FWIW, I found postfix to be generally easier to deal with than the others. And the config files don't look like line noise with comments :).
grep -v ^# exim.conf is too much?
I don't know if it's down to popularity or not, but I notice far more questions on this list concerning Postfix than I do exim.
(Exim user/admin for >10 years here)
On 3/27/2014 2:48 AM, Adam McGreggor wrote:
I don't know if it's down to popularity or not, but I notice far more questions on this list concerning Postfix than I do exim.
I suspect it's due to installed base- my very unscientific survey says that there are far more sendmail and postfix sites than exim sites. (In the end, I also suspect this is rather like the perl/tcl/python/ruby arguments; take whatever works for you and run with it.)
z!
The esteemed Mark Sapiro has said:
On 03/26/2014 02:19 PM, Bruce Harrison wrote:
We are currently running an old mailman instance and am planning to bring up the newest version of mailman and migrate to it. Current system uses sendmail. Since I now have a chance to change things, what is the best mail server to run on my mailman box? It will be talking to an exchange 2010 frontend server (current mailman system is doing that now). I can install sendmail or go with postfix or ??? This is running on a debian box.
Disclaimer: I am not an MTA expert. This is all personal opinion based on possibly limited experience.
I would go with either Postfix or Exim. Both integrate well with Mailman; http://www.exim.org/howto/mailman21.html and http://www.list.org/mailman-install/node12.html.
I have used both in Mailman environments, but Exim only in a Mailman development environment, Postfix both in development and on a production server handling both Mailman and other mail.
I have little experience with sendmail, and while it is possible to hijack Mailman's Postfix integration to use with sendmail, on the whole it seems 'clunkier' to configure, and I see no reason to chose sendmail over Postfix.
I'm not an "MTA expert," either. However, I've used sendmail ever since there was a sendmail. My systems are Solaris, which comes with a good implementation of sendmail, and my installations are all configured to do what I want them to do with regular e-mail.
I found adding Mailman to my existing setups to be quite simple.
You'll need to manually add the Mailman pipes to the aliases, using
the Mailman utility that gives you the list, but with the vi editor,
it's a simply copy-and-paste. The only issue I had with integrating
Mailman with sendmail was getting the Masquerades set up properly to
host a different domain on my systems. however, that is covered in
the O'Reilly "Bat Book," which you should have. It is not a Mailman
issue, and proper configuration is done through the M4 macro files.
I haven't had to tamper with the sendmail.cf file separately.
I think that if you're familiar with sendmail, and have a satisfactory setup, do your upgrade, and integrate it with your current sendmail. I'm aware that most of the people posting to this list are using other MTA's on Linux systems, so there's little support here for a sendmail setup.
For reference, my links between Mailman and sendmail are through localhost to a local sendmail, and I also have a caching DNS server, all on the same box.
For me, switching to another MTA would mean a lot of work learning how to integrate all of the spam filtering and other things I already have integrated and working in sendmail.
Hank
participants (10)
-
Adam McGreggor -
Barry Warsaw -
Bruce Harrison -
Carl Zwanzig -
Gary Algier -
Hank van Cleef -
Mark Sapiro -
Sajan Parikh -
Sebastian Hagedorn -
Stephen J. Turnbull