On 10/14/2010 5:19 PM, Gary Greene wrote:
> On 14/10/10 10:58 AM, "Baird, Josh"<jbaird@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> Actually, as of RHEL6, the default MTA is now Postfix.
>>
>> Sendmail does indeed have a rather lengthy history of vulnerabilities.
>> With that being said, in my opinion, Postfix is also a much more
>> flexible MTA.
>>
>> Josh
> Well, I'd call that a red herring as Sendmail is just as flexible. The main
> issues that people have with Sendmail regarding security or flexibility come
> from the fact that you need to understand the configuration language that
> Sendmail's configuration files use. If you don't, yes, you can easily eff up
> the the security of your mail infrastructure and can get lost quickly if
> you're trying to configure it for more functionality/mail routing/etc.
>
> Sure there have been vulnerabilities in the past, but so has
> postfix/exim/dbmail/etc.... I think the main reason upstream changed to
> Postfix is mostly a) most Linux distributions are using it as the default
> MTA now, and b) it is easier to configure and nothing more.
I think the key phrase above is 'lengthy history'. With that comes years
of hack testing and some holes found. One could even argue that Sendmail
has been more thoroughly 'tested', therefore more robust. I'm running
both Sendmail servers and Postfix servers. I'm in the process of
switching over to Postfix for other reasons, but I've gotten so good
with Sendmail that I really hate making this change and find the Postfix
configs foreign. Easier? Well, it's what you're used to. Most of this
post is really about 'what I use so it is best'. That's not a bad thing,
it just is. Any MTA will at some point in the future have security
issues. The beauty of CentOS is they are dealt with in a timely manner
and provided almost always, as a patch which breaks nothing else. So,
it's really just easy. Choose the one you want and update your system.
Sleep well. :)
John Hinton
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