Hi Brent, on Wed, 15 Sep 2004 09:57:01 +0200 you wrote:
> Ive decided remove M$ exchange
Excellent! Good plan!
> to make the plunge and use Exim4 (used to use Qmail at previous co).
[snip]
> I am totally clueless about Exim.
> Would anyone please be so kind as to maybe point to some examples, or
> links(not exim.org) etc.
Presumably you have downloaded the Exim manual ("specification")? You'll
find that a tremendously useful reference guide although it's true that
it's not the easiest document to get into for someone just starting.
A good starting point would be the Exim book:
http://www.uit.co.uk/exim-book/
which is NOT just a printed out copy of the manual. It will probably help
you get started.
For a basic mailserver configuration (which it sounds like you may have),
you'll actually find that Exim will probably mostly work "out of the box",
with the default configuration. (Except for maildir delivery; see below).
Also, search the archives of this mailing list. There is a tremendous
amount of information and knowledge held within. I think the idea is that
hopefully a fair amount of this knowledge will be consolidated and
organised on the new (under construction) Exim web site but in the
meantime, the mailing list archives are great.
> Could someone please give a lamens term for the definitions of the
> routers, transporters etc.
>From the fairly succinct definition in the spec:
"Routers are the modules in Exim that make decisions about where to send
messages. An address is passed to each router in turn, until it is either
accepted, or failed."
In other words, routers take an address on an e-mail which is being
processed and "do stuff" to it - for example, looking it up in an alias
file and expanding it, redirecting it to somewhere else, or many other
kinds of weird and wonderful things.
Also from the spec: "Transports define mechanisms for actually delivering
messages.". In other words, they contain information about how e-mail is
actually delivered onwards from the Exim box, whether it's delivering a
mail via SMTP to another server, or delivering to a local mailbox on disk.
Again, Exim is set up with a sensible default configuration which caters
for most basic requirements.
> I plan to use Maildir for my users.
That's very easy. You just need to set up a maildir transport that defines
where to save the mail to - there is an example in the manual. There are
lots of different options that you will want to check out - for example,
related to quotas and so on. Also, the options you want will depend on
what IMAP/POP3 server you are using to deliver the mail (Courier IMAP is
often used, in which case you will probably, for example, want to use the
"user" and "group" options to deliver the mail into files that are all
owned by the same "virtual" user and let Courier deal with the
authentication).
Hope that helps.
Tim
