Solved: Postfix vs msmtp?

1

Hello…

I’m considering going with msmtp instead of Postfix on a new RT install.

Any comments on the pros & cons of each? Which would you choose and why?

Thanks,
Tobias

2

Hi Tobias,

We use postfix for the following reasons:

  1. We know it
  2. Even if the postfix service stops (never had it happen in
    production) emails from RT are queued and not lost.
    Being send when the postfix service was restarted (We observed this
    while testing and thought it was pretty cool).

Never tried msmtp I’m afraid

Best Regards

Martin

3

I wil add, and it’s very important if you get lot of ticket the second 2 of Martin is true in the other way, when you received a ticket, if you can it’s much much better to let the RT-host handle the procmail (calling rt-mailgate) because you can stop postfix and make all incomming ticket automatically waiting and don’t loose any mail.

Regards.

4

How is RT supposed to behave if it can’t deliver mail to somewhere else? Is the message queued? Lost? Is anything logged?

5

I’m not sure to understand you question, what you mean by “it can’t deliver mail to somewhere else?” ?

RT use the postfix/sendmail/what-ever to “post” the message after that it’s not RT problem anymore. It’s the problem of
postfix/sendmail/what-ever.

If you question is what append if the postfix crash on the RT server (remember RT cannot use a smtp connexion), I’m not sure but
in my experience RT do not try again but log a message in the web interface.

Saying that just remember postfix or sendmail never crash (at least in my almost 20 years of sysadmin experience).

The only point you should watch is the script used for postfix/apache restart. I personnaly use a simple script to

/usr/sbin/service sendmail stop
/usr/sbin/service apache24 restart
/usr/sbin/service sendmail start

so I’m sure when sendmail (or postfix) is stop so do apache (=RT).

Regards.

6

If RT can’t pass off the message to the service responisble for sendng it as a mail (Like you assumed). I was hoping for an internal queue in RT, but it seems I was right in my impression that there i no such thing in RT.

Marking this as SOLVED, since msmtp is not a good idea since it has no queue where you message (email) can wait if it could not be delivered the moment RT tries to hand it off. We can’t assume that the recipients SMTP server is always available.