Gentoo Archives: gentoo-user

From: kashani <kashani-list@××××××××.net>
To: gentoo-user@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] netqmail and qmail
Date: Mon, 31 Jul 2006 17:09:39
Message-Id: 44CE376E.70609@badapple.net
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-user] netqmail and qmail by Alexander Skwar
1 Alexander Skwar wrote:
2 > Suranga Kasthuriarachchi wrote:
3 >
4 >> Which is the best for organization mail server.
5 >
6 > NOT qmail - too many holes and not good performancewise.
7
8
9 Some clarification on the security of qmail:
10
11 qmail has no known holes be default other than still playing the MTA
12 game by 1998 rules which is are problems and almost as annoying as
13 security issues. Patches like 0.0.0.0, limit-bounce size, etc solve most
14 of those. It also has very few features which is sort of the root of the
15 problem. In order to get features (and performance) you have to patch
16 the hell out of qmail which is of course no longer the secure default
17 build. The 1.0.3-r16 ebuild has 29 possible patches. It's through the
18 patches that security problems are likely to be introduced, but IIRC
19 there has one been one or two that have been found at least in mature
20 non bleeding edges patches.
21
22 and then on performance:
23
24 qmail can be made to perform, but you have to add the performance
25 patches (qmailqueue, big-todo, big-concurrency) and do much more tuning
26 that you'd need to do with any other mail servers. However the one mail
27 per TCP session is one thing you can't get around and will limit the
28 speed of large installations. Most home user or small business users
29 won't run into that.
30
31 Or you can install Postfix/Sendmail/Exim which have had actual
32 development over the last eight years.
33
34 kashani
35 --
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