Fedora Core 2 wishlists

[Nigel Metheringham]

On Wed, 2003-12-10 at 14:11, =?ISO-8859-1?Q? Nils O. Sel=E5sdal?= wrote:
> "Exim is not designed for storing mail for dial-in hosts. When the
> volumes of such mail are large, it is better to get the messages
> delivered into files (that is, off Exim's queue) and subsequently
> passed on to the dial-in hosts by other means."

That sentence could be rewritten as "Exim is not a UUCP system".  In
fact if you read it you will see its not talking about exim use *on*
dial up hosts, but exim use accepting mail for onward SMTP connection
*to* dial-up (or lousy connectivity) hosts.

Use on a dial-up host also has some restrictions - however these seem to
apply to every MTA I have seen so far, so its just a case that its
stated within the exim docs.

> This makes exim a rather poor choice for a default MTA for me ;)
> imho sendmail is nice as the default MTA, making it forward to your
> ISP is rather easy..

I am less anti-sendmail than I used to be - its no longer the top CERT
advisory item of every year.  

However if we are catering for the dumb user default install I tend to
think we should not have *any* MTA (qmail, postfix, sendmail, courier or
exim) but use something closer to a MDA (Mail Delivery Agent) - maybe a
MIA (Mail Inject Agent) which punts everything off to a managed mail
system*.   We should not be encouraging every tom, dick and harry to be
their own mail system administrator because there is pitifully low clue
levels in this field already.

Those that know what they are doing (know as opposed to think they know)
could then install a MTA of some form.  I would like exim to be one of
the supported alternatives (even though I run postfix on a few boxes).

[Now ducking out of this thread as far as exim is concerned (will follow
any comments on my MIA idea) since I don't want to join the list, and
immediately have a full scale flame war :-) ]

	Nigel.

* I am aware that all the MTAs can be configured to act exactly as I
describe the MIA above.  However MTAs are complex beasts with
interesting (and complex) security relationships across the system.  A
pure MIA - and I know there are a couple around - could be *much* less
privileged since it has no local delivery to care about.

-- 
[ Nigel Metheringham           Nigel.Metheringham at InTechnology.co.uk ]
[ - Comments in this message are my own and not ITO opinion/policy - ]