procmail x maildrop

[John Carlyle-Clarke]

Felipe Figueiredo wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> does anybody have an opinion on wether one of the two MDA's is better
> than the other (and in what sense it's better)? Maybe someone knows a
> page/blog that lists pros and cons of each, that would help me decide?
>
> regards
> FF
>
>   
I like maildrop, although I've never used procmail!  I find the 
filtering syntax easy to use, and I know that you can do some complex 
things with it should the need arise.  Procmail's filter syntax looks 
less friendly, but then again it's probably a matter of familiarity to 
some extent.

My reasons for choosing it can be found on the Wikipedia entry:

"maildrop is written in C++ <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%2B%2B>, and 
is significantly larger than procmail 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procmail>. However, it uses resources much 
more efficiently.

"Unlike procmail, maildrop will not read a 10 megabyte mail message into 
memory. Large messages are saved in a temporary file 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporary_file>, and are filtered from the 
temporary file. If the standard input to maildrop is a file, and not a 
pipe <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pipeline_%28Unix%29>, a temporary 
file will not be necessary.^

"Unlike procmail, maildrop uses a structured filtering language.

"maildrop checks the mail delivery instruction syntax from the filter 
file, before attempting to deliver a message. Unlike procmail, if the 
filter file contains syntax errors, maildrop terminates without 
delivering the message. The user can fix the typo without causing any 
mail to be lost."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maildrop