On Wednesday 09 July 2003 09:51 am, Joel W. Leibow wrote:
> Alright, I have decided to take on the task of setting up some sort of
> email service on a new server.  I unfortunately have no experience with
> this type of sysadmin duty, i'm a developer by nature.  I have been reading
> through the sendmail documentation and readme files

My advice: Dump sendmail, and go with exim http://www.exim.org which is weird 
enough that the hackers go "Huh?!" when they see the EXIM banner on port 25 
and go away and leave you alone :-). It is also immune to every attack on 
sendmail, and very easy to set up with blackhole lists to dump spam into the 
dustbin. The only downside is that the documentation is seriously cryptic -- 
it's almost easier to just read the comments in the config file than to 
bother with the documentation. The config file format makes sense, unlike 
sendmail's, which is so much line noise :-).

I must admit that my primary reason for liking exim is not going to apply to 
the typical corporate use of a mail server: exim makes procmail obsolete. 
procmail is a hack and a half. exim allows you to devise your own delivery 
recipes in your .forward file in your home directory (if you configure it to 
do so) so that it actually delivers it to the desired location as part of the 
delivery process, rather than passing it to a third-party program (procmail) 
to do so.  So everything on the pluglist gets delivered to my "plug" folder. 
Anything with HTML code in it gets delivered to my "spam" folder (heh! But 
it's almost 100% accurate!). Voila. 

-- 
Eric Lee Green  mailto:eric@badtux.org
Unix/Linux/Storage Software Engineer needs job -- 
see http://badtux.org for resume