Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: Qmail vs. Postfix

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2: Re: Qmail vs. Postfix (response to 1)
Posted by Malte Sussdorff on
No flames at all. Postfix works fine, not drawbacks and there should be an installation guide on how to get postfix to run acs-mail-lite and notifications. If it is missing someone might have to sit down and write it. After all it is fairly simple.
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3: Re: Qmail vs. Postfix (response to 2)
Posted by Joel Aufrecht on
Qmail is part of the recommended platform because it works, it is documented, and nobody has written documentation on how to use postfix instead.  If someone were to write some documentation, I would be happy to add it in parallel to the qmail docs (which are in an appendix).  Aside from a few lines in ecommerce, I believe that OpenACS in completely indifferent to the outgoing mailer - it uses ns_sendmail, which calls the sendmail binary, which is the de facto API for outgoing mail on unix.
On the incoming mail side, there are several proposals for how to get mail into OpenACS and I think the choice of MTA makes more difference.
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4: Re: Qmail vs. Postfix (response to 3)
Posted by Tom Ayles on

Having extolled the virtues of installing Postfix over Qmail, I guess I'd be a hypocrite if I didn't offer to write some documentation for it 😊. As I mentioned, I've only ever had need for an outgoing only configuration, but when I've got some time, I'll have a crack at writing a parallel guide to installing Qmail. I'll make the setup functionally as close to that for Qmail as possible. What I can't do is offer any meaningful experience of using Postfix to process incoming mail queues and the like, though maybe I'll try and set up a test environment for that.

Regarding proposals for handling incoming mail, is there some location where these are gathered? I'd be interested in having a look, but all I've found was TIP #26, and 'incoming mail' is a sufficiently vague search term to not work so well. I believe Postfix can be configured to use Qmail-style Maildir mailboxes, which go some distance to providing compatibility.

Thx,
Tom

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5: Re: Qmail vs. Postfix (response to 4)
Posted by Mat Kovach on
OpenACS doesn't require qmail (to be fair qmail is never capitalized).  What id requires is maildir and verps.  Postfix is capable of doing both.  In fact almost every mail server can use those.

acs-mail-lite requires that mail be delivered into a maildir style mail folder.  This can be done using the safecat package, maildrop, or procmail as the mail delivery agent for the MTA.

Postfix, Sendmail, and EXIM can also be configured to VERPs in the style of qmail.

qmail is used because it has these features available by default.

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7: Re: Qmail vs. Postfix (response to 3)
Posted by Bart Teeuwisse on
Despite the name of the library (qmail-procs.tcl) the ecommerce package doesn't require qmail since May 14, 2003: http://cvs.openacs.org/cvs/openacs-4/packages/ecommerce/tcl/qmail-procs.tcl?r1=1.3&r2=1.3.2.1

/Bart

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8: Re: Qmail vs. Postfix (response to 3)
Posted by Tom Jackson on

Unless there has been a drastic change, ns_sendmail is just a mail client and sends mail to the configured SMTP mail host, defaulting to localhost. It doesn't directly invoke the sendmail binary.

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9: Re: Qmail vs. Postfix (response to 8)
Posted by Tom Ayles on
Thanks for all the comments! This has really helped me clear up the issues concerning how Postfix can be used to replace fully qmail if desired. When I get the time (hopefully sooner rather than later), I'm going to spend a while testing out various configurations - particularly with regards to processing incoming mail - and when I'm done I should be able to produce something for the install docs. Thanks again.

Tom