Why qmail? - Comparison of qmail with other MTAs

I am just giving the comparison of qmail with sendmail which is being widely used as MTA for the past few decades.

Qmail is a light weight product, and unlike many other MTAs you don.t have to run qmail as root. This is one of the best security features of qmail.

Qmail is a much smaller than sendmail, and it lacks many of the features that most mail servers have today. It has no native support for RBL, which sendmail does have. Also, unlike sendmail, Qmail can’t reject E-mail addressed to a mailbox that doesn’t exist.

Qmail will accept the E-mail message, and then it will generate a "no such user" bounce internally. But these are the standard features of qmail, a large number of add-ons or patches are available, and by applying these add-ons or patches you can make the qmail more powerful than any other MTA.

Qmail.s security features are widely discussed and documented. Sendmail has been hacked, revised, and patched for years. Security vulnerabilities of sendmail is an established fact and well documented also.

One of the nice features of Qmail is that it supports an alternate mail storage format, that’s directory-based, instead of one huge file containing all your messages. If you do a lot of POP3 serving, you can save a lot of CPU cycles and disk activity with Qmail.

Unfortunately, Pine does not natively support this storage format. But, again, there are patches for that out there.

Qmail has a problem if you are sending mails to multiple users of the same domain; qmail will connect multiple times unlike sendmail. This may lead to the wastage of bandwidth.