A friend who shall remain nameless wrote:
I’m a bit nervous about it because everytime I tried Postfix at home, I couldn’t get it to work for one reason or another. Sendmail is ugly but it has always worked for me.
I replied:
That’s bizarre. For me, Postfix has always “just worked”, while I’ve *never* been able to get Sendmail to do anything useful, despite many hours of study of the Necronomicon (aka “Bat Book”). Maybe I wasn’t pronouncing the arcane incantations correctly. I’m probably lucky that I didn’t accidentally summon a demon (when what I wanted was a daemon).
I tried setting up Sendmail when I was first building my own mail server back in 1995. I fought it for weeks. I finally got sick of the frustration and found Qmail, which has worked pretty well for me. The only thing that was wrong with Qmail at the time was the stupid license.
However, in the last few years I’ve become dissatisfied because the author no longer maintains Qmail. Other people publish patches, but because of the stupid license it isn’t possible to distribute binaries of the patched versions.
On the other hand, Postfix does almost everything I need, has plugins fo the few things I want to add (like greylisting), and has a reasonable license. I’ve switched some of my email processing from Qmail to Postfix, and expect to complete the transition within the next few months. The only reason that I wasn’t able to do the transition quickly is that I’d become somewhat dependent on unusual features of Qmail relating to local delivery control.
Currently I have to turn SELinux “enforcing” off on my server machine in order to allow Postfix to hand off email to Mailman. I hope to find a solution to this soon.