[X Servers] AppleMail vs. sendmail

[Brent Baisley]

If you want to implement a powerful email server that you can do just 
about anything with, than sendmail is what you are looking for. 
However, sendmail's power is equal to it's complexity. I have three 
solid years of Unix experience (12 years of Mac) and I've been playing 
with sendmail for about 6 months so far. While I am using it for 
internal use, my comfort level with it is not high enough to implement 
it for external use.
I would recommend looking into qmail. Qmail is also open source and is 
designed as a sendmail replacement, but much easier to configure. Any 
programs you may have written that use sendmail will also work with 
qmail without change. This part is important for me.

One important thing to know about sendmail is that it is strictly an 
mail transfer agent (MTA). It is not a POP3 or IMAP server, which means 
"out of the box" you can't use your standard email client to connect to 
it. You need to also run something like qpopper from Eudora. It's free 
and easy to implement, but it is another piece that you need to 
implement.

Postfix is also a free open source email server you can look into. Like 
qmail, it's designed to replace sendmail.

On Thursday, May 8, 2003, at 05:09 AM, Sytse Kuijk wrote:

> OS X server 10.2.5, AppleMail smtp server.
>
> We have been using the AppleMail stuff since installation here some 
> time ago. It works relatively well, but there is an annoying issue I 
> do not seem able to resolve. I hope someone has experience around here 
> with this sort of stuff.
>
> There are certain addresses (hosts) that, when we send mail to it, the 
> mail is returned with a non delivery message. When checking at low 
> level (tcpdump) I see that for correctly working destinations, the 
> mail is sent by the server immediately after receiving it on the 
> server. For the not working destinations, the server does not even 
> attempt to make a connection, it just sits on the mail for 4 hours, 
> sends a warning to the sender, waits another 68 hours, and sends a non 
> delivery message. Sounds to me that these addresses are damned by 
> something in the AppleMail configuration (DNS settings?), so I wonder 
> how I can reset all the tables etc. the AppleMail has.
>
> One alternative is ditching AppleMail and using sendmail. Is that a 
> better way to go? I never set that up, it is difficult to make it 
> secure?
>
-- 
Brent Baisley
Systems Architect
Landover Associates, Inc.
Search & Advisory Services for Advanced Technology Environments
p: 212.759.6400/800.759.0577