Hi
On Tue, 07 Oct 2008 14:30:48 +0200, Michael Haardt wrote:
> Are there any non-political opinions against committing this patch?
Unfortunately separating the political and technical at this point is
quite difficult, in my opinion, which I'll explain below.
On Fri, 2008-10-10 at 09:36 +0200, Christof Meerwald wrote:
> Personally, I would think that exim should be able to cope with these kind
> of things, but I would prefer to have a generic solution.
Exim can already log far more data than it does by default - the
log_selector config option allows for a bundle of information:
http://www.exim.org/exim-html-current/doc/html/spec_html/ch49.html#SECTlogselector
Given that each member state of the EU can modify the Directive
2006/24/EC to fit their own ends (which in fact the UK govt has done)
it's my belief that providing a fixed format which "fits" is not the job
of the application, but the job of the sysadmin running the application.
In the case of Exim it seems that according to Article 5 of the
directive, the requirements are already fulfilled by the default log
format - this logs:
sending and destination IP
sending envelope email address
all recipients, whether to/cc/bcc or envelope
time
authentication details if applicable
protocols used
I personally do not believe that patching Exim to fulfil the directive
fully is necessary; more pertinently I don't believe it's possible given
the myriad different local interpretations and transpositions applied by
EU member states. On top of that, putting code in like this may actually
breach regulations in other parts of the world (IANAL though).
My reading of the Directive and several interpretation documents leads
me to believe that there is no one format which is necessary, as long as
it's possible to post-process the retained data to locate the
information - which in our case, exigrep is very good at.
I hope others will offer their opinions also, either way. Anyone of a
legal bent might be a useful addition to the thread!
Graeme
