Looking for small, lightweight, MTA [closed]

I am looking for a small footprint (in terms of processor cycles) Mail Transfer Agent for a Linux box. The box is actually a VPS server hosted at Linode. I am building the server to replace all the services that are currently delivered on a shared hosting account. I am running a basic LAMP server. One of my web applications sends emails to users and I have any return emails piped to a php script. All I'm looking for is something lightweight that I can easily configure to pipe these emails to a php script. If it can also act as an outgoing smtp server that would be great too.

I currently have the server running ubuntu 8.04 LTS, but I am not that far down the road, and have many choices if there is a better one for this situation.

Solution 1:

most mta are light enough for any 128meg vps. what make them big usually are the antispam/virus system like spamassassin, clam,etc..

so, if you only need outgoing mail, just install any of exim/postfix/sendmail will be fine.

but if you need incoming mail, you will need good antivirus/antispam. for this, i actually recommend you use cheap cpanel hosting to handle the email and let the vps only do the web.

just like how i usually did it: http://wiki.dennyhalim.com/the-perfect-webserver

Solution 2:

I usually install ssmtp, its simple, lightweight and has practically no deps

See this post, for example, to have an idea of its configuration.

Why I have chosen ssmtp? Simply because it was what I found to be the one having less dependencies among other MTA I inspected. In a minimal install I can always minimize packages installed having ssmtp. exim and others are light enough, but have more dependencies.