[GLLUG] Postfix or Exim?

[Scott Harrison]

> "apt-get install exim4-daemon-heavy" is packaged, shirley?  And it's 
> less expensive, lots more expandable, and probably less likely to break 
> than the $600 thing those guys are trying to sell.  People who don't 
> know anything about tech are the audience for that thing.  The fact 
> that Ian's asking the questions he's asking shows he's not in that 
> category and will be ill-served by the products marketed to that 
> category.
 

Still sticking with postfix here (big improvement from
what I remember from configuring sendmail a decade ago).
I haven't done much with exim.  I'll definitely consult this
thread when I reconfigure some of my mail servers.
As a humorous aside, "those guys" with the probably breakable
$600 product are also on a mission to "develop and advance
technology to better protect our troops, our country and assist
in the advancement of Freedom throughout the world"
(http://www.cybernet.com/products/index.html)
For their mail server product, I suppose it depends on the
warranty and support they provide.
In my own experience however, I've always felt outside vendors providing
gold-level tech support on the phone take longer than
(and have less predictable results) a RTFM approach, unless
it's an obscure windows configuration problem or some other issue with a
piece of proprietary closed software.  The only time I have
seen package and support fees making sense is when the product is also open
and made for free (in which case the community contributions
allow the support fees to be targeted more directly to actual
support; one of my favorite projects in this sense is
OJS, http://pkp.sfu.ca/?q=ojs, http://software.lib.sfu.ca/support.html). 


Judging from the time you reported spending on the mail server, 4 days
x $200 or more a day?, it seems there should be some supportable demand
in the economy for inexpensive yet quality and warrantied vendor support
(assuming that $800+hardware costs is a significant chunk of change).
For me, 4 days that I could spend doing things with my kids or do something
a bit more innovative than maintain a email server is a very precious
amount of time.  Maybe the nature of mail server demand requires too
much site-specific customization in conjunction with internal knowledge
about the organization, like your organization's big 10M+ emails, etc? 


Scott