[Mailman-Users] MTAs

[Heather Madrone]

I've been using Mailman with exim on Mac OSX.  I started with
sendmail (because it comes with OSX and I'm somewhat familiar
with it), but soon got tired of having to wrestle it into submission
all the time and switched to exim.  I've been very pleased with exim's
performance and integration with Mailman.

The OSX setup, however, is only a stopgap while I get my permanent
server set up.  I've been looking for an open source operating system
that will run well on our Ultra 5 (sparc).  We were going with Debian,
which then announced that it's dropping sparc support, so we've switched
to OpenBSD.

The time has come to start seriously thinking about the MTA.  OpenBSD
comes with sendmail, but I'm not going down that road again.  I've heard
good things about postfix, but I've never used it.  It seems somewhat more
complex to set up than exim, and its integration with Mailman does not
seem to be as seamless.

My previous service provider used postfix, and we had recurrent problems
with Mailman's queues getting silently hung up.  A friend of mine who
runs a Mailman/postfix site also has the same problem.  I wrote a perl
script to check for this problem and restart Mailman's qrunner if necessary,
and my Mailman/exim installation hasn't had this problem once.  Is this
problem related to postfix or have I just been lucky?

Things I like about exim:

	* Exim's ability to directly poke the Mailman installation and
	determine legitimate delivery addresses.
	* Exim's ability to handle VERP processing through the MTA
	rather than having Mailman have to do it.
	* Exim's fine degree of control of transient and permanent
	delivery errors (by host, by address, by error type).
	* Exim's informative logs.
	* Ease of configuration and administration.
	* Reliability.

I don't have a huge Mailman installation.  There's one main list with 300
subscribers that gets 50-200 messages a day.  There are two digest-only
lists with 100 and 500 subscribers that get 2-10 messages daily.  There
are a handful of other lists that get a few posts a month.  Everything's in
the same domain.

What are some reasons that I would consider postfix instead of exim?

-- 
Heather Madrone  (heather at madrone.com)  http://www.madrone.com

A rolling stone gathers no mass.