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Postfix all the way, it powers our corporate mailservers :>
Can't go wrong with Postfix IMO. But if you're sending two or three emails a day to known addresses you may want something lighter-weight. Exim4 is nice.
I wish cPanel supported postfix. Then again, I've never had any real problem with exim.
Interesting stats:
http://www.securityspace.com/s_survey/data/man.201212/mxsurvey.html
48% of Internet MX servers run exim.
OpenSMTPd by the OpenBSD project.
Exim is what I'm using now, I'm toying around with OpenSMTPd and will put it in full production once Ubuntu 14.04 (which packages it) goes full release.
Security above all, OpenSMTPd.
+1 for Postfix
So you think OpenSMTPd is more secure than Postfix?
Postfix isn't all too hard to configure, really. If that is holding you back from setting it up, don't worry; there are plenty of guides around to help you do that. Have a look at Ars Technica's, which explains setting up everything you would need on a mail server, or Linode's.
What about sendmail? Some people seem to use that too (according to the website raindog308 posted). Also it's pre-installed in the most distros.
I attribute my hair loss to sendmail, trying to figure out how to configure it.
Again, it comes down to what you want to do. If you want to send a few mails then sendmail will work for you. If you want to build a mailstack with spam & virus filtering and queue re-injection, etc., then you'll find a helluva lot more documentation for doing it with Postfix than with sendmail.
It's not that it has "Open" in it's name, it's that it's made by the OpenBSD foundation, an organization that has a reputation for developing extremely secure software such as that which is running as the default SSH daemon for the largest Linux distributions in the world.
+1 Postfix. In my opinion, Postfix is easier to configure than Sendmail, plus a very large user base to help with any issues. Postfix is as stable and secure as Linux software comes, but perhaps I'm a little bias. One of the first things that I do with a new server is to purge Sendmail and apt-get postfix.
Another important thing to look at is what is the industry using? What software (Dovecot, Zarafa, etc.) has official support for the MTA of your choosing. I see primarily Postfix, Sendmail and Exim4.
And I agree with @IceCream, Sendmail is pre installed on all Ubuntu servers (plus many others). This means Sendmail is supported by a huge community and has passed the community's tests in field.
No. sendmail configs are nightmare to configure and deal with. Yes, they are more flexible but only because they are macro-language actually. But really, they are nearly impossible to read or deal with. And with current postfix you can do anything you can with sendmail anyways and at least it has human-readable configs.
Today you go with either postfix or exim. No sendmail unless you've knew and used it before and already learned its config syntax.
any other than sendmail
exim4 or dma for local only mail delivery.
I'm gonna try opensmtpd, I like it's config syntax.
If all you need is non-local delivery (smarthost) then I'd recommend nullmailer forwarding through sendgrid. I only have a small number of outgoing emails a day from my servers, so I fit within the free 200 per day and this suits me well.
This has reduced the headache of managing blacklists, being flagged as spam etc. It also means that there is no risk of running an open relay