Author: Jeroen van Aart Date: To: exim-users Subject: Re: [exim] Problems with manualroute
David Cantrell wrote: > It took me forever to upgrade to exim 4. For someone who doesn't spend a
> lot of time looking after mail servers, upgrading your own one is quite
> daunting. Mail is the one service that you really don't want to break.
True, but if you follow for example debian's migration docs it is rather
painless. Unless you have a lot of tricky custom configuration. I first
created an exim4 configuration file with all the custom things from
exim3 applied and did test it to see if it was syntactically correct, I
also had a safe fallback exim4 setup (a vanilla debian config with the
usual exim4-config additions). All went well and downtime was the
duration of stopping exim3 and starting exim4. If things would have gone
wrong I could have easily kept email working by using the fallback
configuration, which would at least guarantee email throughput, but
would momentarily break customs stuff like mailinglists (not such a big
deal).
I'd think migrating from, say, sendmail can be rather painless too. It's
a matter of carefully checking the customisations you have and
implementing them in your new exim4 config. Do a few test runs on a
cloned server.
I am personally not such a fan of doing a lot of customisation in the
MTA, but rather use a spamfilter to do such things. Since most of it is
related to some form of filtering. The few things I have are
mailinglists (mailman), smtp authentication, encryption and a few debian
related tweaks (using macros).
