Re: [Exim] comparison of exim and sendmail

> > I know that the subject looks quite funny for the exim community ;-)
> > but I *really* have to compare these two MTAs.
> > Personally I'm a happy exim user but I'm trying
> > to persuade my boss to implement exim in our company...
> > Actually sendmail runs there and I don't find it working fine.
> Sendmail does work very fine, and scales quite well indeed, with proper
> tuning.
> "If it aint broke, don't fix it" is a rather good thing for production
> boxes.

The single biggest problem with Sendmail, one easily demonstrated to anyone
with eyeballs, is the sheer baroqueness of Sendmail's configuration system.
Even with the advent of the .mc file (and before that, the IDA extensions to
Sendmail 5), there are still times when you need to be able to read (if not
change or write) the .cf file yourself, and doing so can be an extremely
painful, error-prone process. I actually got an apology once from Mr Allman
himself, at a USENIX confernce some years back, when I asked him, 'Eric...no
offence but...what were you thinking?!'. Maintainability is a very important
factor, and Exim is, IMO, more easily maintainable.

Beyond that, I've had people tell me that they've seen significantly better
throughput on high-volume machines with exim over sendmail, but I don't
currently run an installation large enough to see much difference (if I were
still at Cornell, I would; but then, when I was at Cornell, we also ditched
Sendmail [IDA at the time], in favor of zmailer, for much the same reasons:
easier to maintain; and better throughput).

I, too would be interested in a more thorough comparison of the two
packages, if anyone is either A] aware of one or B] interested in doing one.

Mike Shappe
Itasca Internet Services