Re: [LUG] free Red Hat stuff

[John Horne <J.Horne at plymouth.ac.uk>]

On 15-Feb-00 at 13:37:21 Alex Charrett wrote:
>> FYI, and as Alex may remember, we don't use sendmail on the Uni's central
>> mailhub but run exim (http://www.exim.org) from Cambridge Uni instead.
>> The author (Philip Hazel) is about to put together an O'reilly book on
>> exim. It may be worth hanging on (albeit that it may be some time yet!)
>> then taking a look unless you really want sendmail.
> 
> The main thing I need to be able to do is hook majordomo into it, and on
> the want to do list is set up authenticated smtp.  
>
Both possible with exim. We run majordomo with it, and I have tried out the
authentication with it but this is still under discussion as to its use to
us.

> How do you find exim?
>
...at http://www.exim.org ...ha! ha! sorry, couldn't resist. We have had no
problems with it and have just convinced PCFE (a local college) to have a
look at it for their new mail system.

It runs pretty much straight out of the box, but then it is all the
configuring that takes the time (as with most things nowadays). It has one
configuration file consisting of different sections and is a bit more
'english-like' than the squiggles in sendmail :-)

The manual was a big plus in our case; about 300 pages of postscript (or
text/html if you want it). It is more of a reference manual than a beginners
guide, but that is being worked on. There is a basic FAQ too. It is well
maintained, and overall exim is well supported through the mailing list by
the author (and others of course). 

It is, obviously, difficult to give any real idea of what it is like. You
need to install it, fiddle with it and see if it is going okay, then either
dump it or persist with it. Usually I join the mailing list to see what sort
of support seems available - no problem there. I can only 'recommend' it on
the basis that we have had no problems and it seems relatively easy to set
up - although we have had it for the past couple of years now so it would be
easy! We also tried qmail and zmailer for a while (about 3 months) but for
various reasons ditched them. Sendmail didn't get a look in due to the bugs
and security problems abounding at the time, and its notorious configuration
syntax was not something we looked forward to. We settled on exim after a
reasonably short testing period - about a month I think.

As said, try it and see if you like it - if you don't then use something
else :-)

John.

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John Horne, University of Plymouth, UK             Tel: +44 (0)1752 233914
E-mail: jhorne at plymouth.ac.uk
Finger for PGP key: john at jhorne.csd.plymouth.ac.uk
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