--On Tuesday, January 15, 2002 09:03:41 -0700 Darren Spruell <Darr...@sento.com> wrote:

Exim got the security reputation it might have because there was a chapter in it's manual on security and because it was able to change the UID it runs as to non root. I ran Exim at an ISP I worked for because we had clients who required ETRN, qmail and courier do not support ETRN for good reason. I don't really have anything bad to say about Exim. It's one of the most flexible/configurable MTAs out there. Had Postfix been available when I worked at that ISP I would've chosen Postfix. Postfix has a very solid security and performance reputation and is the MTA of choice for hub.FreeBSD.org where all the FreeBSD mailing lists run. From the get go Wietse Venema's goal was to keep the security and exceed the performance of qmail at the same time make Postfix a real world drop in replacement for sendmail. In most cases Postfix will read aliases.db that was generated by sendmail. The big gripe about qmail back in the day was it's poor support for sendmail aliases. qmail's fastforward package takes care of that for the most part. So after running qmail, Exim or Postfix in the past for a minimum of a year each -- I'm now runnig Courier. So far I see no reason to look back. You get a little of qmail's style of doing things, you get very flexible aliases support. A choice of many ways to support virtual domains/users. And you get lots of integration with IMAP, POP3 and HTTP acces to delivered mail. My primary reason for switching from Postfix to Courier has to be Courier's much cleaner support for filtering incoming mail. A collegue and I have been wrestling with Postfix and maildrop to filter incoming mail and came to the conclusion that passing information from one stage where mail is potentially accepted or rejected to another has exceeded the level of complexity we were willing to deal with. Courier is far more consistent and better documented in that regard.