On Tue, 28 Feb 2012, Josh More wrote:

> I am a big fan of Qmail. I find it an intuitive and well-designed system. 
> If you use it, use QmailToaster, and everything will go together really
> nice.
> 
> That said, the vast majority of *nix geeks disagree and prefer Postfix
> instead. You'll find better documentation and less pain down that route.

I /used/ to use qmail. I had it for AGES. I'm talking probably over a 
decade of basically the same setup, since there's not been a new version 
of qmail in, well, probably a decade. And I loved qmail because before 
that I actually had to administer sendmail *shudder*.

The problem is that the internet has changed a lot since then. I used to 
not get any spam. Then I started getting some spam. At the height of the 
problem I was getting -- I am not even kidding -- THOUSANDS of spam 
messages every DAY. Thousands.

Plugging spam-eradication into qmail was just incredibly hard. I tried for 
AGES and it never worked right, and all the solutions were basically 
hacks. Getting SSL/TLS support into it was a big part of that.

So eventually I took the plunge and switched over to Postfix. It was 
actually a lot less painful than I had anticipated. The biggest problem 
was converting all the .qmail-* to an /etc/aliases, and that was really, 
REALLY not a big problem.

So I have postfix, spamassasin, RBLs and a few other things. There's still 
spam, probably 100-200 messages a week that actually make it through and 
are processed, and spamassassin/procmail/alpine catch 99% of that, so 
ocassionally one of those will actually make it to my inbox.

I have Dovecot for imap (actually s/imap).

I use Alpine to read mail on my desktop. But since I have secure, 
authenticated imap I can use whatever mail client I want (which translates 
to Alpine, K9-Mail on my Androids and rarely Horde/IMP as a fallback).



-Yaron

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