Philip
I follow with some admiration the sterling work you do on Exim. I hope you
will consider a suggestion for the instructions.
I am not a windoze or a Unix user - I come to Exim as a RISCOS user,
because my unix shell host uses it. Maybe that gives me a useful
perspective that can help you. Maybe not! You decide.
I also have a long history of technical writing - though not in computing.
See
http://www.4qd.org/biog/rjt.html and my sites linked from there.
Getting to grips with Exim, Unix, the whole lot - is a pig. But (after
nearly a year with the server), I've just tumbled some important facts
that help hugely in understanding Exim. If these were in the instructions,
as an introduction, I think it could help lots of other users.
I refer really to a sort of Flow-chart (probably in words rather than a
chart as such) explaining the typical flow of emails around a server, and
the part Exim has to play in that.
For instance, my own case..
On Arachsys.com as a user I seem to have two 'controls'. The 'aliases'
directory and the .forward file. The aliases file gets looked up when I
post an email and when one is received. The received email is then dumped
to my shell account (if it passes the aliases file) where it is further
processed according to the .forward file.
I think such a flow is fairly typical? An understanding of this flow is
pretty essential to grasping Exim, I think? So an explanation would make a
very good intro.
Clearly, as it's an introduction, you don't need to cover every fine point
and the style should be chatty and readable rather than technically
correct.
Such an introduction would not only introduce the workings of Exim, but
would introduce new users to Exim and email concepts. It might also help
you organise your thoughts? I know that such an explanation would have
done a lot to ease me into it.
If the idea has any merit and I can assist further, ask. I also live and
run the business from Burwell, not v. far from Cambridge.
--
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Richard Torrens
4QD manufacture speed controllers for battery electric motors.
www sites
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---------- We use a RISC PC 32 bit RISC computer ----------------
