Hacker News Reader

Comment by genghizkhan | Hacker News Reader

I run my own email server as well, and I've been using postfix/dovecot quite happily with zero issues. I've been contemplating opensmtpd as well, though I'm not sure where that stands when it comes to being run in production environments. Also, reconfiguring mailservers is a PITA, I'd rather stick with a setup which just works.

Could someone explain why one might want to use qmail (or this, its newest incarnation) over postfix or opensmtpd? Would I gain anything by shifting to qmail or opensmtpd?

View on HN

I'm an opensmtpd developer.

As far as opensmtpd is concerned, it is production ready and has been used in high volume environments sending mails to millions of recipients daily, handling multi-million queues.

The project was started in 2008 so when it comes to being run in production environments, I think we can claim that it's ready :-)

Now as for the what you would gain, I won't do proselytism, we have published a couple presentations on our website which describe how it works and some of the technical details behind it. You will also find lots of technical details on my blog where I post mostly about OpenSMTPD internals.

If you have a running Postfix, I suggest you don't shift but keep your working setup. If you intend to setup a new MX, you should definitely give a try and see how it goes for you.

Thank you very much! I shall have a look. I'm thinking of moving servers and setting everything up from scratch in order to modernize all my services and remove legacy cruft. I will definitely consider opensmtpd.

For the moment, we're targeting sysadmins who already run qmail (or netqmail). Much later, when we begin to approach feature parity with Postfix, notqmail might start being an interesting alternative. We hope that time will come. If you can't figure out why you'd run it right now, you're probably right :-)

Thank you! I will definitely keep a weather eye on this project! :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com