John,

I have not used the Courier MTA yet, as we are still entrenched in qmail at this point. But, I have used the web mail portion since it's inception, and have followed the development of all of the Courier components. That said, I cannot really answer your question, but I do have some points to bring up.

First, Mr. Sam has done an excellent job of following the RFCs and standards. The software is well thought out, and the souce code is much easier to understand and modify than DJB's (although I notice that you ship postfix at the current time).

Second, and probably key, is that Courier was designed from the start as a modular SMTP server with filtering capabilities. I don't know about you, but I know that my customers are very concerned about e-mail bourne viruses and network clogging spam. Personally, it is not much of an issue to me, because I don't advocate using mail clients that are open to virus attacks, but still most companies use them. I think that a marketable "e-mail server appliance" would have to have some sort of virus/spam/inappropriate content filtering capabilties to really succeed. Courier probably has the best architecture for incorporating those features.

You would probably need to invest some development time in "fixing" the strict compliance to the standards. It is a sad fact of life that a compliant server that won't work with the majority of "broken" clients will not be too popular, no matter who is right or wrong.

All in all though, I can not think of a better overall mail package in which to invest development resources.

Good luck, and feel free to contact me off-line if you are interested.

-- donald purnhagen do...@rtsolutions.com

real-time solutions 1427 arbor avenue suite 10 dayton, ohio 45420

John K Watson writes: