On 2008-09-20 at 13:03 +0200, Mirko S. wrote:
> 1. SMTP-Authentication.
>
> This works just fine, but everybody has to login with the same login
> data, what I don't like. I tried different lines for server_condition
> (like "${if saslauthd{{$auth1}{$auth2}}{1}{0}}") but none of them
> worked. Everytime I try logging in via /etc/passwd-login I get the same
> error as if I login with invalid login data.
>
> If it doesn't work with /etc/passwd, I'm also open for other methods of
> authentication.
su to the exim user account, run "exim -d -be" and in the string
expansion interactive prompt, try using saslauthd{} there. Log messages
and errors will all be shown to you.
Normally, people just run "exim -d -be" as themselves, but since you're
trying to talk to a system authentication daemon, I suspect that there
may be permission problems involved.
You might need to use -d+auth or -d+expand or -d+auth+expand instead of
just -d, to get more detail.
> 2. Temporary failures. The second point is, that sometimes communication
> with other mail-servers will fail for temporarily reason. Of course, I
> can't prevent this. But there are two things I would like to tell exim
> to do:
>
> a) More retries. When I looked at the log-files I saw, that it retried
> after 5 minutes, and next time after more than 24h. Can I set thows
> retries as I like?
Yes. The default configuration includes a line like:
* * F,2h,15m; G,16h,1h,1.5; F,4d,6h
The F and G are for Fixed and Geometric progressions.
This means, up to 2 hours, try every 15 minutes. Then, up to 16 hours,
try first after 1hr, then at 1.5* that (1.5 hrs later, 2.5 hrs after
start), then at 1.5 times that (1.75 hrs, so 4.25hrs after this section
started), etc; then, after 16 hrs, try every 6 hrs, up to 4 days, then
fail.
Since Exim does no retries without a retry configuration (so temporary
errors are permanent) I wonder how you're running Exim and if you're
starting any queue-runners?
You need to either start queue-runners from cron or have the Exim daemon
launch queue-runners (which is the normal way). Eg, "exim -bd -q15m"
will have the daemon launch queue-runners every 15 minutes. -q2m for
every two minutes, -q1d for once per day, etc.
> b) Information for the sender. Can I tell exim to send a mail back to
> sender, if it doesn't work for e.g. 1h with a content like "I couldn't
> send your mail for 60 minutes, but I will keep trying". And after a
> successfull transmit I'd like to get a mail like "I did it, finally!"
The delayed notification normally happens after 24hrs. Look at the
delay_warning option. There is no support for success notifications.
> 3. Spamassassin. I use spamassassin for checking mails, which works fine
> most of the time. But sometimes spamassassin seams to be down, so that
> exim can't connect to it. My Questions:
> a) Does somebody have any idea, what the problem could be?
Your logs probably do. Unless you've disabled Spam-Assassin's logs.
What do the logs say?
> b) Can I make exim retry connecting to spamassassin before transmitting
> the (spam)mail unscanned?
Pass (I don't use SA and I'm tired).
> 4. Autoreplay. Can I make exim automatically send replies to the sender
> of mails, if the recpient is on holidays? And what would be the best way
> to make this configurable by the users (I don't want to open the
> exim.conf any time, somebody goes on holidays :P )?
First, make sure that this comes after heavy anti-virus and anti-spam
filtering, since otherwise you generate back-scatter.
Then, look into using the autoreply Transport in Exim.
"27. The autoreply transport" in spec.txt (The Exim Specification);
also, in the FTP/HTTP site where you got Exim, there should be a file
"config.samples.tar.bz2" (and "config.samples.tar.gz" if you prefer).
This contains example config snippets, full configs, etc.
C006 is an example of vacation autoreply, using files in the user's home
directory. If the mail-server doesn't have access to home directories,
then you could set up a cron-job to synchronise files to a directory on
the mail-server and adjust the "file =" line in the vacation transport.
> If you need more information just feel free to ask. If you don't
> understand what I mean, you may also ask. I know, that there are people
> who speak a better English than me :P
Your English is just fine. A couple of typographic errors but the only
thing which made me pause was "thows" -- I think you meant "these".
(I'm not entirely sure).
-Phil
