Best MTA?

[mastercc119]

Hi
Which one is the best MTA to use in an ISP environment. I have been using Sendmail because I found it installed where I work. IS there anything better out there to run on Solaris unix?

 

[jad]

nope, not really.

in an ISP environment you'll find that by a long way sendmail is the most popular SMTP agent.

if you want an easy to configure MTA you could look at procmail, but to be perfectly honest we have only ever used sendmail and it works great.

why don't you like it, what features are you missing? can we help?

 

[mastercc119]

Well not major problems per say. I was asked why we still use it? Also, I need a detailed procedure to recompile sendmail.cf. Help. And generally how to install sendmail 8.12.9. detailed procedure from the tar file.

Thanks

 

[jad]

umm ... matters which platform you are on ...

if you're on a solaris platform you create the main-v7sun.mc file and type 'make' ... and it will compile it from the m4 files ...

if you want the latest sendmail you're better off looking for the patches on suns site rather than recompiling it yourself ... the sun version has all sorts of extras, plus is compiled by sun using sun's compiler ...

http://sunsolve.sun.com/pub-cgi/findPatch.pl?patchId=110616

upgrades to 8.11.7 (at time of writing)

 

[trabadam]

Well, you can see at

http://www.freebsd.org/ports/mail.html

for the list of various mail-related stuff (with a lot of MTA's there). However, I still prefer sendmail for it's flexibility and because I don't have time to get familiar with other MTA (I don't belong to those who install software by pressing "Next" button repeatedly, so I spent a lot of time before my sendmail became what I want it to be )

 

[Rhinokiller]

Popular misconception here ....
Procmail is not an MTA but rather an LDA (local delivery agent). Maybe you were thinking about Postfix ???

 

[jad]

probably, you see i don't use either

 

[trabadam]

>> Also, I need a detailed procedure to recompile sendmail.cf
Actually, the tarball has a set of README's that span the matter (you need <sendmail_pkg>/cf/README), so I just clarify some aspect that are not reflected there (maybe because Allman thinks it's trivial)
- when you specify some value in statements like DOMAIN, OSTYPE or FEATURE..., the file with the same name must be present in <sendmail_pkg>/cf/[ostype,domain,feature...]
- you can create file with any name (e.g. <sendmail_pkg>/cf/cf/my_custom_config.mc), then create the config file with
cd <sendmail_pkg>/cf/cf
./Build my_custom_config.cf
(make sure to rename it to sendmail.cf if everything goes Ok)
- make sure the values of external programs' filenames set in statements like SOME_MAILER_PATH and SOME_MAILER_ARGS or confEBINDIR reflect the actual location of the programs (e.g. if you install newre version of something in /usr/local/bin/program while default setting reads /usr/bin/program)
- when rebuilding binaries, use commands like this
cd <sendmail_pkg>/sendmail
./Build -c -f ../devtools/Site/file_with_my_settings.m4
(I do not know why, but specifying full pathname from / did not work while ../ helped), run them in the source subdirectory of every program from the sendmail package you decide to install (e.g. I used mail.local for it's simplicity instead of procmail), file_with_my_settings.m4 must contain settings for all those programs.

 

[jad]

i'd still recomend using the one that Sun produce, even if it's not the most up to date Sendmail ... it has all the security features put in it and it's a damn site easier to maintain than setting lots of variables, modifying scripts and making sure which version is the correct version ...

but thats just me

 

[mastercc119]

hi

I found the SUN PATCH very effective and easy to use. But it does most of the job for one, and I got sendmail 8.11.7. fine with all security patches done. Sometimes one would want to know more, what to do, and what has to be done.

Thansk for you help guys. I appreciate all.

Chris