Another alternative to sendmail is Innosoft's PMDF product.Like Post Office, it is a commercial product for which you have to shell out some cash, but their support team is top notch, and PMDF runs on several platforms, including VMS and several Unixes. They (Innosoft) can be reached at http://www.innosoft.com/.
-- Javier Henderson, May 11, 1997
There is also a very good free alternative to sendmail on Unix: qmail, written by D.J. Bernstein. You can have a look at it at http://www.qmail.org/ . It doesn't come with any kind of management tools or a GUI but it is safe, easy to install and very fast in most situations. It is not made as an replacement for sendmail. Mr. Bernstein requires you to have some basic knowledge about the "Unix way" to use software. I use qmail on several Linux machines (all 486/33 with 16MB RAM) without any problems. SPAM filtering and virtual domains are included in qmail. If you are looking for a free REPLACEMENT for sendmail you probably have to wait for the initial release of Vmail, a project startet by Wietse Venema (http://wzv.win.tue.nl/vmail/).Frank
-- Frank Tegtmeyer, October 18, 1997
I just wanted to add to the support for Qmail. I've used it on my SGI Unix box as a complete replacement to sendmail since I first started it up. It's a lot easier to configure than Sendmail, and the qmail mailing list is pretty good at giving help if you're stuck.
-- David H Dennis, December 5, 1997
It looks like if you want to run Post Office on an Intel platform, you can only do it under NT.Too bad they don't support any of the free Unixes available.
-- Javier Henderson, December 30, 1998
I've had some good experiences with Exim (see The Exim home page for more information). Exim is an open-source mailer, adopted by the GNU project, developed by Philip Hazel, at Cambridge University in the UK.
It allows seperate aliases files for each domain you are hosting - for example I ensure that webmaster@tardis.org and webmaster@netcetera.co.uk go to two separate addresses, while hosted on the same box.I don't currently have a patch available for the "multiple addresses for MTA's" problem, and I'm not sure how simple this is for the MTA to control. I imagine that what is required is a patch to make the server bind to a specific address, rather than just the first one in the list. I've seen this type of patch for some IRC clients, but not for an MTA.
I use exim in a busy ISP - it's easy to manage, has a useful API to hook custom tools into, and seems to perform well. I've had no problems hooking in listservers such as majordomo into it.
-- Jonathan Care, April 13, 1999
I've admin-ed a bunch of Unix boxes since the mid 1980's (gasp) and at my advanced age (36) I'm not as impressed by thoroughly complicated machinery anymore, I just want stuff to work. So I was looking at ditching sendmail for one of the newer vintage (although sendmail keeps rev-ing). After playing around with a few packages, and hosing the sendmail that came with RedHat (see - I told you I got lazy), I decided to reinstall sendmail since I had a deadline coming up. I downloaded the source, and installed the way you install any other Unix software - skim the README, then type make; make install and grab a cup of coffee. Well, hey, they actually have a directory with a really, really short file that runs through a gazillion M4 macros to generate sendmail.cf Turns out that after all these years of battling the output, I should have been playing with the tiny little file that does exactly what I want, and is more like all the other Unix s/w I play with. I almost always edit config.h before installing, sorta like the mydomain.ini for ACS. It was pathetically easy to do, installed without a hitch, and did exactly what I wanted. There are decent examples on the web of tweaked files ... Turns out that sendmail has such a REPUTATION of being difficult, that I actually let myself get sucked into believing it. YMMV.
-- Alfred Werner, July 19, 1999
I have extremely good experiences with qmail. It is simple, secure, fast, feature-rich and easily extensible. It follows a standard Unix way of designing software, with lots of small replaceable processes linked together with pipes.I set up qmail with virtual domains, spam blocking and a mailing list manager (ezmlm, designed for qmail) for an ISP guy in England. Even though I had never used Solaris before (!), qmail was easily installed.
Where do I submit articles for the Web Tools Review? I would like to write an article about setting up qmail.
-- Guan Yang, August 15, 1999
In addition to PostOffice, Sendmail, and Qmail there is another alternative that goes by the name of Intrastore.. which really promises a lot more than the various products mentioned above.. with a web interface.. and coming from the venerable CDC...this product is free on linux (availbale on other os's as well) for upto 250 users..I have tried Intrastore and it works like a song receiving upto 1000 messages a minute on a DEC ALPHA..
-- Ramaswamy V, August 25, 1999
Yet another free mail transfer agent alternative is postfix, check <http://www.postfix.org/>. It's designed as a sendmail replacement, is fast, secure, easy to install and configure, and reliable.
-- Mike Fischbein, September 3, 1999
Exim is also my mailer of choice (for my home configuration, which is quite complicated; for simple configurations, well, sendmail comes with RedHat, so why bother changing it).
Exim has a bunch of advantages:
- Actually written with some thought about security, so no "comedy" rootshell security holes
- Configuration files that don't look like line noise[1]
- Comes complete with an excellent filtering tool, which you can use to do some things most MTA's can't do in a tightly integrated fashion (an obvious example is to fork a message; an example of a situation in which you might want to do this is to short-circuit delivery of mail to a user's local maildrop, but also kick it out onto your ISP's relay so that it can get to them if they're not home at the moment. That's actually what the example below is for.)
- Perl bindings (though not, unfortunately, as general as you'd want -- they're pretty much just for rewriting rules.
- Written by those nice people at the Cambridge University Computing Service[2]
- Compact and comprehensible manual
- Drop-in sendmail replacement (pretty much)
2. OK, maybe that's not an actual advantage
-- Chris Lightfoot, September 18, 1999
Oh... and about your "great unsolved problem" -- this sounds to me like a problem with the upstream relay. There's no reason that I shouldn't be able to emit mail from, say, "chris@ex-parrot.com", into "relay.some-service-provider.net", so long as I am doing so from "some-machine.some-service-provider.net" (i.e., a machine for which relaying is permitted through that host). The fact that the message From: line is not "someone@somewhere.some-service-provider.net" should not be relevant.
-- Chris Lightfoot, September 18, 1999
When I went to find this software I got this: Attention Post.Office Customers: As of September 1, 2001, Openwave will discontinue the sale of Post.Office* from our corporate Web site and through our sales force. We will continue to offer support services for Post.Office through Openwave’s Technical Assistance Center (TAC) for an additional twelve (12) months with support ending August 31, 2002. openwave apear to have taken software.com as given by P. Greenspun in the link at the head of the article.
-- Laurence Cuffe, October 4, 2001
Personally, I install Postfix whenever I needs a MTA. Postfix seems to be the best alternative to Sendmail. It provides Sendmail compatibility, in a more secure and modular way, with a configuration that is clear to understand. Postfix is also lighter when it comes to system load.I used Postfix as a SMTP gateway for a 2000 active mail users messaging system. It was trouble free.
-- Hubert Figuiere, March 12, 2002