RHCE: Postfix vs. Sendmail

jmritenour

I've worked with postfix before in a SAS70/SSAE16 compliant environment, so I'm pretty familiar with configuring and securing it, relaying, etc.

Sendmail, however, I've never touched before, and reading up on it in Michael Jang's RHCE book makes my head spin. I can't for the life of me see why anyone would use it over postfix. Is there any point in trying to learn it, and if so, can anyone recommend a good resource that's relatively easy to digest?

Bodanel

It's enough what you have in Jang's book. If not explicitly asked you can use postfix during your exam but RH it's pushing postfix as a default mail server. The only reason i see for learning something about him is the posibility to encounter legacy servers with him where your working

W Stewart

The great thing about linux is you can usually find learning resources in a lot of different places and you're bound to find somebody who thinks closer to the way you do and explains it in a way you would understand. You could probably put postfix on the box if you can find the rpm on the redhat cd during the exam but I've come across enough sendmail and qmail servers at work that I've learned to adapt to whatever technology I happen come across. I do a whole lot of reading at work.

https://www.centos.org/docs/5/html/5.1/Deployment_Guide/s3-email-mta-sendmail-default.html

Configuring Sendmail SMTP server on CentOS & Scientific Linux | Unixmen

pram

Sendmail is literally the worst. If you ever work in a large MSP environment though chances are extremely high you'll be dealing with it. A lot of places still use it because it was the standard MTA for years, and sometimes it takes a very convincing or compelling reason to switch.

I've seen a lot of ec2 images come with sendmail installed by default as well. Amazon Linux for instance (iirc) comes with sendmail for cronie instead of postfix/exim.

ironlung

I agree with you postfix is very straightforward and easy to confure/modify. Sendmail on the other hand is not as friendly.