# Which MTA?



## gpatrick (Jan 28, 2011)

I want to host just a few virtual mailboxes for a few domains and have been trying to decide between Sendmail, Postfix, or OpenSMTPD.

I want ease of maintenance and ease of installation as my main priorities.  I've read good things about OpenSMTPD, and realize that Sendmail is the most tedious.

Pros and cons for each of them would be beneficial.


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## tingo (Jan 29, 2011)

I would go with Postfix.


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## dennylin93 (Jan 30, 2011)

I'd go with Postfix as well. I've been using Postfix for over a year (~1000 users with MySQL backend).

The good part about Postfix is that it's pretty mature; it has all the features you need. Plus, it is easy to configure. The documentation is pretty good. It rarely has vulnerabilities as well. No cons so far.


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## DutchDaemon (Jan 30, 2011)

Note that for "a few virtual mailboxes for a few domains" you really only need two files in /etc/mail/ (local-host-names and virtusertable) in the case of an existing (i.e. Sendmail) installation, which doesn't need to be altered in any way. Don't make this any more involved than it really is


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## anomie (Jan 30, 2011)

[ caveat: I'm not a mail expert; set up just a handful of SMTP, POP, IMAP, webmail, et al. installations for customers ]

I have learned to really appreciate mail/qmail. It is stable, secure, and there is a good amount of freely available official and unofficial documentation on the 'net. 

OTOH, it's hard to go wrong with mail/postfix. The primary advantage with postfix is it's getting active, regular development (rather than a stagnant code base that you have to apply a bundle of patches to for various features, as with qmail).


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## Pushrod (Jan 31, 2011)

I always use exim. It's well documented, and it doesn't dnl have those insane config files dnl.

It's easy to integrate with an SQL backend, which makes life an awful lot easier dnl.


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## DutchDaemon (Jan 31, 2011)

FUD. As I said: you don't even have to touch an .mc file (which is not hard to understand at all with the proper cf/README) to get virtual mailboxes and domains working under a stock Sendmail installation using normal files under /etc/mail/ and the 'make' command.

[cmd=]vi /etc/mail/local-host-names[/cmd]

```
example.com
```

[cmd=]vi /etc/mail/virtusertable[/cmd]

```
@example.com              somebox
john@example.com          otherbox
pete@example.com          anotherbox
jane@example.com          some.one@else.where
```

[cmd=]cd /etc/mail && make && make restart[/cmd]

Wow, rocket surgery.


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## krasi_d (Feb 1, 2011)

For me is Postfix,because good working with ClamAV Anti Spam with bogofilter and procmail .


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## DutchDaemon (Feb 1, 2011)

All of these work with Sendmail just as well, there's nothing Postfix-specific about it.


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