Re: [exim] suggestion - exim-new-users

On Wed, Nov 16, 2005 at 02:35:10PM +0000, Philip Hazel wrote:
> > I am not asking for Exim to be dumbed down for the lowest common denominator,
> > just pointing out that it is very hard to take in everything at once.
>
> Absolutely. Not only is Exim large and complicated, the whole Internet
> email area is large and complicated. Running a public MTA *is* rocket
> science.

I disagree. Rocket science? Mail is just a good deal independent details
with almost trivial looking structures behind. Nothing that really twists
your brain. Given good knowledge about Unix in general and six to eight
months time, you can learn anything needed to run a large scale cluster,
from its hardware, to Exim and POP/IMAP daemons, LDAP, the glue that holds
all together, monitoring and of course performance analysis and tuning.

That time scale is my personal experience of teaching new co-workers,
and because mail is not rocket science, I add a large scale usenet system
and some minor services to make it about 10 months teaching and a more
interesting job afterwards.

It all starts with 1-2 weeks reading the Exim manual and some RFCs.
Philip did the trick to write a manual that serves both as reference,
but can be read like a book, too. I skimmed the Exim book and liked
how it gives a good background, but sometimes I wonder if there should
be signs like: "Don't worry, RFC 2821 does not bite. At this point,
please come back once you have read it."

I dare to say: Exim comes with anything required to master it, but if
you don't read the manual, you are doomed to write new introductionary
documentation until you repeated its first few chapters, and parts of
the book. Oops. I didn't mean to sound grumpy. :)

Michael