On Tue, 22 Dec 1998, David Waine wrote:
> Although I find exim somewhat easier to configure and maintain that
> sendmail that I tried initially, I still suffer from "reference manual
> overload" when trying to set up something new to me.
>
> What I could really do is with a tutorial on exim; maybe it's too simple
> to require one, but I'd estimate that about 80% of the options exist to
> overcome some form of abuse of e-mail OR have an impact on security.
> With this in mind, it's very difficult to gets to grips with "mail"
> without having suffered the problems of abuse and hence be aware of the
> somewhat convoluted way in which permissions must be given, but at the
> same time security only be maintained with checks.
I think that the exim docs do give a good overview how exim works from the
begining, and that the most commonly used configuration options are also
documented in the default/sample configure file.
But I also think that you have a legitimate point that might need to be
reframed. In the old days, anyone configuring an MTA was familiar with
mail transport in general. Now-a-days there are more and more people who
are setting up MTAs who only have the vaguest notions of what SMTP looks
like, what DNS is (and more specifically MX records) and the like.
The exim docs are outstanding if you already know something about mail
transport. But as we move to a world in which everybody is a postmaster,
there needs to be an introduction to mail transport in general. Whether
such a thing would be a good use of PHs time when preparing documentation
is an open question. But it certainly would be nice if someone wrote
a good mail transport management document, using exim as the MTA.
Anyone want to put in a book proposal to O'Reilly?
-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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