Re: FW: Re: [Exim] Exim on a single-user system

[snip]



>
> | Mozilla and Communicator (4.x and 6.x) do, and most of the newer
> | KDE and Gnome MUA's do as well.
>
> Yes, but many of them are fairly buggy or unstable. SMTP is just one
> more feature the developers must get right in all their free time ;-).
>
> | So, you don't *have* to use an MTA on a workstation,
>
> What if my cron job fails? How will it notify me? What if something
> goes wrong on the workstation, how will it notify the admin (I'm
> thinking of tripwire or other monitoring tools)?


Assuming that you mean you the user of the workstation then you could
always set up Procmail to deliver mail. OK it would only deliver mail
locally, but that's what's required here.


> | and unless you are familiar with how to operate one, and understand
> | the responsibilities you take on by doing so, you shouldn't.
>
> You should have one, setup as you describe below
>
> | That said, if you *do* understand how your choice of MTA works, that you
> | really don't have a real 'local' domain, and how to make it use a
> | smarthost, that is a perfectly valid setup.
>
> Systems should have this setup out-of-the-box (as much as possible).
> I don't know if the 'eximconfig' program is a Debian-thing or if it
> comes from Philip or someone, but it works very well to create an
> exim.conf. It can create a smarthost configuration (given the name of
> the server) or it can create a "real" internet site configuration.


The only snag with having a MTA set up 'out of the box' is that it can't
be setup correctly (unless the packager's mastered ESP ;-)); having an
misconfigured MTA is probably worse than not having one at all, and you
can guarantee that however good the install/config routine is some
lusers simply won't know what to put in the fields.

Presumably this is why I see so much mail floating around with a return
address of '@localhost.localdomain'...

One query -I don't know how this applies to Exim, but I've seen it
stated with Postfix that submitting via SMTP rather than via sendmail
command is much faster - anybody know how they compare using Exim?


Pete