I'm going to install qmail

Mormegil

Mormegil

It's past time for me to migrate my mailserver to my new setup onsite. I've put it off because of my failure to document my relatively complex (at least to me) qmail setup in the days before I started documenting religiously. It's been up and running more or less unattended for almost 3 years.

I've been torn on whether to try and recreate and document what I did before or move to Postfix. The current setup does everything I need it to do, even if it did take a lot of effort to get it there. I've also got a masochistic fondness for it, having devoted so much time and brainpower to figuring everything out.

So, reasons for going:

- Stagnant development
- Complexity (patches and such)
- Lack of documentation beyond lwq, the mailing list and whatever is scattered around the Internets
- New mailserver at work uses Postfix
- Something new

Reasons for staying:

- Familiarity
- Ability to start putting new server together now without learning new MTA
- Desire to reclaim lost glory
- Umm
- Got to be something else
- DJB is a pretty cool guy?
- Not sure if the ultra-secure argument still holds water anymore or not, but there was always that...

Look at that, 7-5 in favor of staying. All pretty emotional reasons; I guess I'm more of a right-brained kind of guy.

I'll still start messing around with Postfix, maybe I'll fall in love with it a few months down the line and do this all over again. Who knows? Feel free to try and talk me into doing it now :P
 
There's no question. I've already made up my mind, hence the title. Just sharing my thought process on this.
 
Mormegil said:
There's no question. I've already made up my mind, hence the title. Just sharing my thought process on this.
Click to expand...

qmail is great. I am in the same place as you. After conquering qmail is it time to learn another mta. There are other choices than postfix like exim.
 
I know you are staying, but why?!?!?!?

"Complexity", "Lack of documentation", "Stagnant development"

Why not learn Postfix? I went from Sendmail to Qmail to Postfix .. been on Postfix for years now. When I switched over, I picked up a book (O'Reiley Postfix: The Definitive Guide) and was off and running.. Now I maintain several Postfix mail servers in various configurations utilizing ASSP in front for spam/graylisting/blacklist/etc and it works great. When there is a config tweak or issue, it does not take much time to get it addressed.

Its one thing if your comfortable with qmail + patches but sounds like you have it setup and don't have a full understanding of how it works.. if people are relying on the setup for their emails and it completely blows up, how quick would you be able to restore services? Just something to think about.
 
Those are all very good points, I should clarify. I'm very comfortable installing, maintaining, and administering qmail. I guess I'm pretty attached to it because of the time and effort it took me to get everything running just right. It's how I learned about email. I'd be able to, and have before, put everything back together in the event of a system failure. I'm just not as clear on why certain features work the way they do on a lower level, namely several of the spam-fighting ones and dkim. I ran around google for a really long time trying to find up to date documentation and source code. I pulled information from several sources, and saved them all. But I don't remember exactly what I used from where and the specific steps I took to build everything.

For the past few years, I've documented everything I do with any degree of difficulty religiously. I recommend that everyone do the same. The only reason I'm doing this from scratch instead of just copying everything over from the old server is so I can get it in my wiki.

I still intend to learn Postfix. For work, to satisfy my own curiosity, and most importantly, peer pressure.
 
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