Daniel B. Thurman wrote:
So my question is:
Which of the two Email systems are the most secure, that most people
use and trust, has better control over intrusion and has good AntiSpam
and AntiVirus support?
Historically, sendmail has had a bad reputation for security, though
widely used. It's also had a bad reputation for its obscure
configuration language; look at sendmail.cf and you will fully
understand that.
postfix was written (by a chap working for IBM, so its pedigree is fine)
to be compatible with sendmail at the commandline level, to address the
security concerns and to be easier to configure.
I used sendmail from the beginning[1], back when it had those security
problems and the obscure configuration language was the only way to
configure it, on OS/2 and thence to Linux when it was what Red Hat
shipped on RHL 3.x and 4.x.
I believe its security problems have been addressed, and the m4 macroes
in the sendmail-cf package make it easier to configure, but postfix
remains the MTA of choice for many users and is the default in some
distros including *suse and *ubuntu*.
Debian prefers exim which (I think) is also in Fedora and EL.
If you need to ask, probably postfix is the best to use. Its main
configuration file is semantically easy for mere mortals to follow and
all configuration files have good comments.
It's what I use whenever I need to choose: internal machines tend to get
the vendor's choice with default setuo.
[1] By the beginning, I refer to my experience of internetting, around
ten years. My first internet-facing server ran RHL 4.2 on a '486. The
only way my ISP of the time hat to prevent sendmail's public relaying of
traffic was, once he spotted something, fiddle with his routing table.
Oh, one of sendmail's helpful features was to qualified unqualified
addresses; I was a client of iinet then, so mail from fred became mail
from fred@xxxxxxxxxxxx, even when injected from afar.
--
Cheers
John
-- spambait
1aaaaaaa@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Z1aaaaaaa@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
-- Advice
http://webfoot.com/advice/email.top.php
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555375
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