Best lightweight MTA

alilet

What is the best lightweight MTA (for Debian) that doesn't take much RAM and CPU to work?

goodwin

exim

sanvit

Postfix

SirFoxy

Postexim

alilet

Three responses and all different. Great!

Neoon

postfix, nothing else.

FHR

Postfix

alilet

Postfix it is then. I will try it out to see how it goes.

ITLabs

+1 for Postfix, stronger history regarding security.

Refs.:

• https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-8450/Postfix.html

• https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-10919/product_id-19563/Exim-Exim.html

dfroe

I doubt you'll ever run into a situation where one of the MTAs mentioned so far will turn out as a bottleneck whereas another one would sustain the load.

Therefore, use the one you are familiar with and you are able to administrate.

BTW, I'm using Postfix since more than a decade on various mail servers and am quite satisfied with it.

angstrom

Another option is opensmtpd, which is ported from OpenBSD:

https://packages.debian.org/buster/opensmtpd

alilet

I am a noob and this will be my first attempt to run a mail server so as per most members recommendation I will start with postfix.
Just read about opensmtpd and it looks very interesting. Will also try this one as it seems to be easier and lighter than postfix.

angstrom

@alilet said: Just read about opensmtpd and it looks very interesting. Will also try this one as it seems to be easier and lighter than postfix.

opensmtpd is lighter than exim or postfix, but unless you have a very low-end server, the "weight" of any of these shouldn't be a significant issue.

I've used opensmtpd on OpenBSD -- it's nice. The main practical issue is that there are relatively few users of opensmtpd compared to exim and postfix, so if you want to do "unusual things" with opensmtpd, there's less information available. But for normal usage, the documentation should suffice.

tgl

I suggest you use postfix, even if others sound more attractive.

postfix is used by most people and if you are a beginner you will find lots of support and tutorials about it.