Change your Mail Transport Agent (MTA)

June 06, 2005 Posted by Ravi

A Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) is a software that transfers electronic mail messages from one computer to another using a client server application architecture. An MTA is also called by a few other names such as - a Message Transfer Agent, Mail Relay, and Mail Transport Agent.

Some of the popular MTAs in use are Sendmail, Exim, and Postfix.

Fedora and Red Hat Linux distributions by default ship with Sendmail as their MTA. However, switching to another MTA such as Exim or Postfix is quite easy.

Switch between MTAs

Method 1 : alternatives command

In Fedora or Red Hat, you can change the default MTA by using the alternativescommand.

With alternatives, an executable with a generic name on the file system is used to access a particular service. This executable is really a symbolic link to another symlink in the /etc/alternatives/ directory. For example, the /usr/bin/sendmail is actually a symbolic link to /etc/alternatives/mta . In order to select between Sendmail or Postfix, we just change the symlink for the /etc/alternatives/mta . This is normally done with the alternatives command. Here are some examples:

To display which MTA alternative is in use:

# alternatives --display mta

To choose from the available MTA alternatives from the command line :

# alternatives --config mta

To setup Postfix as the default mail system:

# alternatives --set mta