
On Sun, 24 Dec 2023 21:13:55 -0500 Anthony de Boer via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
On 2023-12-24 11:49, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:
I used to use Sendmail but switched to Postfix some time this century. Why do you choose Exim instead? Is it just that Exim is the default on debian?
A lot depends on which one you know how to drive. I've run Exim at a couple of jobs and know some of the experts online, so it's what I grab when I have to set one up. Note, I use a single config file the way the Exim community means for it to be done and nuke Debian's attempt at modularizing when that's the underlying OS.
one config file is a major plus for me too, but postfix has a lot of advantages also, imho Postfix & Exim are both very mature and cool I also use/like both and deciding which one is usually depends on which distro.
In the past I've had occasion to drive smail2, smail3, qm**l, sendmail, postfix, exim, and nullmailer over the course of being postmaster at a few places. Most of that I'm pleased not to have to revisit.
(Note I blip the vowels from qm**l as was the custom on alt.sysadmin.recovery back in the day; a certain MTA author grepped his Usenet feed and would join any discussion that mentioned his work so it became one of the things not mentioned there.)
I used qmail the 1st time around 1997, when I was still @compuserv, it was quite a lot more secure and very cool then :) but yeah, djb was hectic, (mind you, so were many others) it was djbdns that made me stop using all things djb tho.
(And apropos that newsgroup and MTAs, someone there had a formal curse: "May your sendmail.cf be edited in Notepad, only to be discovered on the next reboot".)
I remember this curse and never quite got it... so, you remember? we had this 'uptime' ego thing going way back then (so who would reboot?) and then, so what if your mta has ^M and is down for the minute, hello, you just rebooted! - anyway, my immeditate thoughts were not even that, it was: someone allowed their sendmail.cf to be edited should not admin a mta... I still lovingly think back to BOFH, now that was exceptional content :)
Merry Christmas, everyone.
+1 and I see your merry xmas and raise you a Happy New Year to all :)