Note that SPF and DMARC are fully implemented outside the sending message transfer agent, but are interpreted and acted on by the receiving agent, which we need in SMG along with full DKIM support both ways. 

These are separate issues from this Idea, so please check those other Ideas that need our votes (clicking on that up arrow to the left of the title)

DMARC checking and enforcement

DKIM checking+enforcement

DKIM+ logging

This is very sad to hear, common appliance was a good way to simplify OT development and customer support time. It seems that with every acquisition Novell/NetIQ products fall lower on company priority.

Personally my preference in this story would be

1. appliance
2. docker image
3. separate install (rpm or other)

The state of the art is DMRAC / DKIM / SPF and much more. GMAIL / MS and other large providers no longer accept mail without DMRAC / DKIM and SPF.

Second remark: speed up the correct implementation of DKIM and DMARC!

For security reasons I would prefer a SLES server, because we can patch it at any time. But I am afraid for the integrations that are needed. One of them is the openDKIM part that is used. Another the antivirus. I don't know if you have seen the news, but Yahoo and others have put more restrictions on their emailsystems in the last months. That means that DKIM and DMARC are required and no longer optional for all emailsystems communicating with e.g. Yahoo. If there is more time for the developers to cover these items then I would vote 'YES'.

One thing I often do is 2 SMTP interfaces on 2 different IP addresses. On the appliance I add the second IP with yast and I bind the second IP to the second SMTP interface in the SMG admin interface. I know: not officially supported. But when the rpm and server OS are seperated, this can become a common option.

On the other hand: when we update the OS ourselves, that breaks the responsability for the complete stack. And it can lead to more SR's when something is not working.

So I am having mixed feelings about this, like Diethmar Rimser  But I tend to vote 'YES'.