I'm looking to replace our aging mail server and I've decided that I want to change the SMTP server software we use. We currently run exim. Over the years I've worked with a number of other MTAs (namely Postfix and Sendmail), and in my opinion, they all suck as far as configuration is concerned: they're all arcane, fiddly and inelegant, at least compared to the other mission-critical daemons I have to work with on a daily basis (Apache, MySQL, Dovecot, etc).
Our mail server does not handle much volume (we use MessageLabs to filter inbound mail: I am sure you will appreciate the pleasure that can be had from blocking access to tcp/25 on your firewall) so I don't need something that's high performance. Spam and anti-virus are also not too important, again thanks to MessageLabs. What I really want is a simple, terse configuration syntax that doesn't require arcane knowledge to read and write. Something that can accept mail for n domain names, and deliver to our IMAP server according to a simple mapping.
Any suggestions?
Best Answer
Postfix comes ready to run out of the box now for most distros with limited configuration required. If your delivery server is the same for all domains, configuration will be limited mostly to adding domains to your "destination domains". If you need to deliver to an internal server, just set it up as a "relay host" with the destination machine's IP in brackets [10.0.1.50] for example).
Also, there is a Webmin panel for Postfix which takes a lot of the tedium of editing text files away.