Back in August 2006 Dan Shearer did
A comparison of Mail Transfer Agents ( part 1 , part 2 )
in which he mentioned he was interested in doing a survey of MTA software
to see what was the most common.
Some previous surveys had been done by
D. J. Bernstein but nothing big for a few years. I talked a bit to Dan Shearer
but I think he lost interest so I started myself.
However (as often happens) I only got half way though since the software I was
using had a few bugs in it. My programming skills suck so I decided last
week to rewrite the whole program in python (it is currently in perl) at some
point.
Today it looks like I have been beaten to the punch, There is an article in O’Reilly SysAdmin
titled Fingerprinting the World’s Mail Servers
by a commercial organisation that has done such a large survey.
Going though the article it looks like they did similar to what I was intending
although their numbers look a little funny in places. They don’t have full
details published so it’s hard to be sure.
The moral of the story is that some things are easy to do if you have the right
tools and skills. My problem is that since my programming skills are not
good enough I was beaten to the punch by somebody else.
I’ll still look at doing the survey later this year however.
