Weblog entry #1 for Sali
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3 companies
20 domains
3 ethX, 1 tunY
3 10.0.0.0/192.168.0.0 net
1 w.x.y.z real net
I've run sendmail for many years, until last week with a version from 2003 on SuSE 8.2 (yes I know, outdated to hell) but it did what I've expected.
My upgrade to Debian4 was more than necessary, but I "apt-get --purge remove exim4" and "apt-get install sendmail".
This was the moment the trouble begun.
Together with dovecot-imapd it was about 100 times quicker, my clients were very happy how much I've improved their email.
But I read the mail.log carefully and I see some trouble since my HELO is something local and it have to be more a real FQDN. My BIND9 has not changed much. Basically the same like before, and of course I've read A LOT sendmail stuff and I know of the "Modifier=bf" option, and "confDOMAIN_NAME" thing. And if I manually edit the sendmail.cf and hardcode my preferred Domain in, I will get what I want. Just the *.mc knowledge seems to be not enough for me, and also the webmin-sendmail plugin don't work properly.
So to make a long story short, I've decided to change my mail system. But what to choose? Exim, delivered with Debian4? Postfix, supported by Webmin?
I really don't know.
There are three piles of dirt, what to choose?
And qmail is no option, since it is not OpenSource. And also all the other "low used" mailer out there: no option, I want a MainStream choice, so I can let my server run another 4 years and come back to get the same trouble as now. ;-) (Then with ipV6 I guess).
Comments on this Entry
I'd also recommend you don't use Webmin to configure your MTA. Webmin is an insecure, poorly maintain piece of software and is no longer in Debian for these reasons. It's also no competition for actually knowing what you are doing, which isn't hard to learn if you're willing to spend some time on it.
Personally, I'm a Postfix fan. A few years ago somebody ran a presentation on a large Postfix installation he'd done for a university, so I had a play with it and liked it.
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And to Webmin: Webmin is great if you have a current plugin, it makes the life so much easier. It is not much of a help if you don't know what to do, but why shall I ssh to my server and "joe sendmail.mc" and "sendmailconfig" if I can do the same so much easier with some clicks in my browser. And my Webmin is usually not open to the wild, just inhouse and via OpenVPN from home. Just if I "play" with my iptables I open it, so I have another backdoor if I get locked out ;-)
And thank you for your advise regarding Postfix, I will give it a try on my VMWare. You seems not to be the only one who like Postfix.
[ Parent | Reply to this comment ]
It's been 10+ years since I've used sendmail, but this Sendmail Introduction indicates there should be some kind of build script to convert all your M4 files into a sendmail.cf -- if the Debian package doesn't include that in the default location, I'd expect there's updated info in the README.Debian for sendmail or sendmail-doc.
And this page leads me to believe that the Dm command is defined in one of the included M4 files, and if you edit it, add the "define(`confDOMAIN_NAME', `$w.$m')dnl" afterwards, and regenerate sendmail.cf, that you'll be set.
And for the last question, I've used both Exim and Postfix since getting out of sendmail. Nothing in a particularly large-volume environment, though.
[ Parent | Reply to this comment ]
Currently, I use Postfix to all MTA´s:
1. Much better and complete documentation than sendmail (or other MTA´s in general).
2. Simple and highly intuitive configuration syntax.
3. I saw a lot of sites pointing sendmail one of the worst performance MTAs on the free market. First comes qmail, second Postfix.
4 Fast / easy learning.
So, the only piece of advice I can give you, is to try out Postfix. Will be even easier to find help if you get into trouble. If in a few hours you are still stuck, get back to sendmail.
[ Parent | Reply to this comment ]
I'm already installing Postfix on my VMWare server to play around. Thank you very much for the advise.
@all: This seems to be a nice place for an administrator to get some help, since usually all ERRORs ask the enduser to ask the local administrator for help ;-)
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I stuck with Postfix because the security model is that much more sophisticated than Exim's, but sometimes I think may Exim would have been simpler.
I'd regard either of them as a perfectly good choice, but I detest Webmin, and manage it all with the command line.
With that many users I'd probably go for Postfix, just because "soft bounce" is so easy to toggle at the start of your config file! But maybe that is just my paranoia about rejecting email incorrectly.
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Obviously you also think there are better mailer than sendmail, and this already 10 years ago.
It seems I was a little lazy with reading the *.Debian files, sorry but I'm really a Debian noob.
[ Parent | Reply to this comment ]
And I've already tried Postfix, WOW that was easy to get it run on my VMWare, hehe, out the box it is an open relay, but it was just two lines of config to let him fake my sendmail domain. Impressive, but when I read deeper I saw it will be a LOT of work to let him do what I want.
But now I can more relaxed try out Exim too, so I can really decide what mailer I will be using in the future.
Thank you very much for all the support here!
[ Parent | Reply to this comment ]
'Howto: ISP-style Email Server with Debian-Etch and Postfix 2.3' by Christoph Haas
http://workaround.org/articles/ispmail-etch/
Pete Boyd
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