On Wed, 1 Apr 1998, Paul Mansfield wrote:
> > On Tue, 31 Mar 1998, Pollywog wrote:
> >
> > > The documentation is very confusing to this beginner.
>
> Thus I disagree to some extent with the above statement, unless by beginner
> it meant not just a beginner to sys admin but total newbie to the internet
> and email or smtp + tcp/ip
I entirely agree with Paul.
If you don't know about mail transport and system administration in
general, any MTA is going to be very rough going. I have installed
and or managing mailhubs using
sendmail (a variety of versions)
mmdf (you don't want to know)
pp (I still don't know how it works)
And, I am not really very good at these. (The setups that I am
in the process of replacing are nothing to be proud of and there
is much to be ashamed of).
Normally, when I set up a test system, I expect many days before it will
have the basic functions (much less the fancy things like virtual domains,
spam filtering, header rewriting, etc).
I had exim 1.82 up and running phenomonally fast (my only snag was that I
was trying to use .db files created directly by sendmail instead of
regenerating them). It is by far the easiest to configure MTA that I have
come across. Not only that, it is far and away the best documented.
While there are things that I would like to see with the docs (e.g., lots
of examples of directors and routerts for doing common things, possibily
in a separate file or in an appendix), the docs are outstanding. It is
definitely worth printing out the specs and binding it.
Mail transport is hard (just be glad that you don't have to deal
with uucp and bitnet; it used to be much worse). Exim makes it much
easier.
As tools make it easier for people to become sys adms, we have a growing
problem. There are postmasters for sizable sites (meduim sized business,
university schools or departments) out there now who don't even know what
full headers are, much less the distinction between header and envelope.
Many of them are running some NT products which are misconfigured or
non-complient in important ways.
This is not to say that Pollywog shouldn't be trying to configure an MTA,
but if s/he is trying to set up a system for other users and run
some sort of internet service, there should be some time understanding
mail transport. Consider yourself lucky. You've got exim to start
learning with. Not sendmail 5 in the pre-O'Reilly days.
-j
--
Jeffrey Goldberg +44 (0)1234 750 111 x 2826
Cranfield Computer Centre FAX 751 814
J.Goldberg@??? http://WWW.Cranfield.ac.uk/public/cc/cc047/
Relativism is the triumph of authority over truth, convention over justice.
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