Re: [Exim] Understanding directors + deleting duplicate mess…

Typing away merrily, Ross Boylan produced the immortal words:
> As an added wrinkle, I want mail to my wife to be duplicated to me, so I
> can tell her when she's got mail. I'm doing this now with a smartuser
> director.

If you're going for such an open system anyway, why not have the mail
delivered permissions 660, group mail, and then use a setgid xbuffy to
see when mail gets delivered to that box? Or gbuffy if that's available
as a Debian package.

> Footnote: Why I don't want to use procmail:
> 1. It's another program to learn, administer, and run.

If you have a hammer and a screwdriver and don't want to learn to use
the hammer, don't complain that the screwdriver isn't very good at
driving nails.

> 2. It appears to lack any real documentation (all I see are FAQ's, tips,
> guides, but nothing laying out the command line options and the file format).

I'm sorry, but this is nonsense. Procmail has four manual pages:
procmail(1) - general info, command line, etc
procmailrc(1) - config file format, syntax, etc
procmailex(1) - examples - lots of them (incl duplicate filtering)
procmailsc(1) - scoring (guru territory, don't worry about it)

Duplicate filtering based on Message-ID matches is a two-line example in
procmailex(1) which can be dropped straight into ~/.procmailrc

> 5. It just seems ridiculous to have something described as a MTA which
> neither gets nor sends most of the mail (since fetchmail and procmail do
> the work).

If you happen to be collecting your mail with fetchmail from a POP3
server, so be it. But the mail so collected will still be fed into the
local MTA (in this case Exim) so that the delivery logic therein can be
used. This allows fetchmail to not worry about a large number of
system-dependent issues and so be smaller, simpler and robust. Ie, it
farms much of the work out to Exim.

And if you're not using procmail, then it's not doing much of the work,
and not acting as a transport.

Both fetchmail and procmail are used for getting mail to you. Since you
appear to also send mail out, I suspect that Exim is doing all of the
work there once your MUA has finished.
--
HTML email - just say no --> Phil Pennock
"We've got a patent on the conquering of a country through the use of force.
We believe in world peace through extortionate license fees." -Bluemeat