azeem ahmad writes: > i have never configured it. i m a student not a sys admin. n i have to > configure a mail server that must meet enterprise requirements. > its mine assignment. thats why i was asking about qmail and sendmail from a performance point of view, any of the "big 4" Mail transports can provide enterprise quality service. in fact, all 4 of them are used in this manner in one place or another. high volume mail transport is inevitably disk bound, cpu speed/count and choice of MTA are less important than you might think. sendmail is the ancestral MTA. it used to be a lot harder to configure than it is now, but it's still no walk in the park. licensing is derived from the BSD family of licenses. exim is a spiritual decendant of smail (no common code though.) it's monolithic in construction (which fans of qmail/postfix hate), but has been pretty free of security advisories over the years. i have used it for 10 years now, and don't feel any compelling reason to move on from it. it works well. it is designed to be fairly easy to install in place of a sendmail installation, although the configuration files are different. licensing is GPL. qmail is its own creature. it works hard at not being sendmail, makes a number of unique decisions, and is heavily modularized for security purposes. some of the unique decisions are controversial (e.g., massive parallel delivery when only one destination host is involved.) licensing is most assuredly _not_ open source. postfix is modularized too, but maintains a useful degree of sendmail compatibility. postfix users seem to like it a lot (i've never used or learned it.) licensing is a complex ibm specific license that's sort of open source. it'd be really nice if ibm would bag this license and put postfix under the GPL or something.
