“How to go about choosing a POP service for your Unix e-mail
server.”
“Mail transfer agents (MTAs) mediate the server-to-server
communications. For two decades, the majority of MTAs have been
sendmail running over Unix, but the competition has been heating up
as alternative applications (including Postfix, qmail, CommuniGate
Pro, and others) and operating systems (often Windows NT, but
occasionally AS/400 or other special-purpose OSs) take on the
standard configuration.”
“MTAs often share their “local” work with mail delivery agents
(MDAs). An MDA is a process that places a message where a user can
access it with a mail user agent (MUA). The most popular MUAs now
are POP clients such as Eudora, Outlook Express, and Netscape
Communicator. The focus of this article is on the MDAs that serve
POP requests for these end-user applications. Here, we look at the
POP servers in isolation from their clients.”
“All the POP daemons we’ve tested have had relatively easy
installations. Most commercial vendors have a try-before-you-buy
option.
“Choosing a POP server needn’t be traumatic. All the leading
alternatives are reasonably easy to understand. The range of worthy
alternatives means that, whatever the scale, security restrictions,
flavor of Unix, or required customizations you need, you’re likely
to find at least one that’s an adequate fit.”