“Tired of the sendmail’s cryptic configuration, or do you
find yourself complaining about its speed? Well then, postfix could
be the MTA for you. The Postfix website defines postfix as a
MTA which “attempts to provide an alternative to the widely-used
Sendmail program.” If it’s speed and security you’re looking for,
Postfix is a very nominal choice for a MTA. According to the
project’s web site, Postfix is up to three times faster than its
closest competitor, boasting the capability to send up to 1,000,000
different messages in a day.”
“The MTA uses multiple layers of defense to protect the local
system against intruders, as well as having the ability to run in a
chroot jail. Installing on most operation systems is a trivial
procedure, although in FreeBSD installation should be done
differently to avoid the overwriting of the binaries when a make
world is done. Another way to avoid this is to use a mail wrapper.
(For more information on mail wrappers read the “Mail Wrappers”
heading under the Installation section.)”
“All of the many configuration parameters can be found in the
main.cf file, located in the ./conf directory in the postfix
source. You need not change every parameter, as they are set to
sensible defaults. Here are the details on some of the more
important parameters, which will affect the performance of Postfix
the most. Please note that if you change the main.cf file after
installation, you must issue the postfix reload command. After
installation, the main.cf file can be found in the /etc/postfix
directory.”