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Re: Qmail vas Sendmail



Hi,

I've been running Qmail for the past 2 years, with excellent results. I've
never experienced a problem with it, except once (which I'll describe
later). Recently, I've installed Qmail on a server in the Technion which
will be the Technion mail gateway (well, for most of the Technion) and I
have had quite a few surprises with its performance. It doesn't crumble
under heavy loads, and you can safely assume that the amount of email
messages that goes through it now is very large (hundreds of thousands a
day, I'd say, if not more).

If you're very intrested in performance, take a look at the README files
that come with the distribution. 

One note: If Qmail has a lot of deliveries done, it writes a log to the
log file, and syslog starts sync'ing continuously resulting in high CPU
and disk load.

Solution: add a hyphen in front of the mail log filename in syslog.conf

The one problem I've had with it is that I tried to move the queue across
disks and I've (saddeningly) found out that the files in the queue have an
inone-dependant filename. I had to wait till the queue empties itself
before moving to a new disk. Defrag utilities' users, watch out. The
author promised a tool for moving queues around in version 1.03.

One more note: The pop3 server that comes with Qmail handles $HOME/Maildir
maildir mailboxes ONLY. If you wish to use the good old mbox format (which
I recommend, due to lack of support in MUAs), get Qualcomm's qpopper and
make modifications. I have a diff output available if anyone needs it.

Summary: Use it. I found nothing wrong about it. It has a few
configuration files, though, so it has a learning curve for sendmail
users, but the curve isn't steep and is very short, so I'd recommend doing
that. Value-added stuff: better aliases support, user-definable mailing
list support, supports procmail, .forward and everything else you're used
to. For mailing lists under Qmail I'd recommend ezmlm.

You can get the latest version from
ftp://ftp.rifkin.technion.ac.il/pub/qmail

Shachar.


Shachar Tal
-------------
Taub Computer Center, Technion, Israel Institute of Technology
KeyID 0481FEF1 fingerprint = 52 1B 97 6A F2 77 AE C6  64 B6 5A 5E 14 28 8E 7E