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Comment by sschueller | Hacker News Reader

I haven't run across many who use Exim. Any benefits over postgress/dovecot?

Postgres is a db and Dovecot is a IMAP/POP thing. Exim is a MTA and I think you meant to say Postfix 8)

I personally use Exim. The developers of both have collaborated as required with each other in the past over certain issues and both projects are very mature. They are rather different beasts and there are loads of articles out there comparing them.

Well still the default mta on Debian, so it has some userbase, at least as a local mta. Might catch some by surprise, but maybe those systems should not have had direct exposure to the internet in the first place.

It's supposed to be lighter for purely local installations with an single binary, and was the default mta for Debian for a long time for mostly that reason. some of the points made doing that decision is available here https://wiki.debian.org/Debate/DefaultMTA#Comparison

For the most part postfix/dovecot have become the default for full scale mail servers but back when the Debian defaults were decided there was still some uncertainty about what would replace sendmailNG as the lightweight default mta.

EXIM is much easier to configure than postfix. Postfix is faster than EXIM.

They are both mail-trasport daemons (basically mail relays).

dovecot is comparable to Cyrus, it's not a mail relay, it's POP/IMAP server used for accessing mail from storage.

> EXIM is much easier to configure than postfix. Postfix is faster than EXIM.

You might have the two reversed?

I don't have hands-on experience with Exim, but every "getting started with email" document on the internet seems to recommend Postfix as easier for a beginner to install.

Before Debian made exim default and made an ungodly mess of macros and unintelligible crap out of their config, it was pretty simple to configure.

In fact, as an old hand (been dealing with exim configs since 2001), the very first thing I did and still do is delete the default debian hell and copy-paste a simple two-screen config which then needs only 3-4 lines tweaked.

I don't have them reversed, EXIM is indeed far easier.

Postfix has a high learning curve; the master.cf vs main.cf and the "chaining" of email filters (milters) is a lot more of a hurdle than exims comparatively simple configuration.

The issue is mostly that postfix is installed by default more places, so it's the default, much like sendmail was. And that setting up an MTA is quite difficult anyway.

It's basically an accident of history. But both are fine in their own right, neither is inferior to the other, just trade offs.

to offload some of the postfix install complexity this repo is actively maintained ... been using it in prod for a few years with no issues ... postfix running on debian inside a docker container https://github.com/tomav/docker-mailserver

IMHO, Exim's configuration is horrendously complicated. That's not to say that Postfix is a piece of cake; however, Postfix has fewer bells and whistles. For example, I struggle to comprehend the "router" system: https://www.exim.org/exim-html-current/doc/html/spec_html/ch...

Exim's configuration is very expressive. Being able to do complex things has the tradeoff of being able to get lost in the complex things you've done, that's a given.

But I wouldn't call it complicated, not really. Expansions usually bite, but it had a REPL-like facility for getting them right since forever. The rest is pretty nice and clean DSL in my opinion.

Wasn't exim the default mailer for many distros?

It's default for Debian: https://packages.debian.org/buster/default-mta

Though not for RedHat or Ubuntu, both use postfix.

It likely has everything to do with our current President’s inability to strike a diplomatic tone in any public discourse.

Please don’t down vote me for an obvious statement, but I do feel the maturity of Political discourse was brought to the school playground level with the election in 2016.

Apologies, app posted reply to wrong comment.

exim allows much more customization. Most people don't need that level of customization, and postfix is definitely easier to use precisely because you just write settings, you don't write configuration logic.

I'm still using exim, but not for any specific reason. It's just what I used in the beginning and I never had a reason to change.

I prefer NodeJS and Docker.

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