brian@emwd.com writes:
I think it really is not that complicated in getting exim setup, at least with a Centos system.
I didn't mean to imply that it was. As I wrote elsewhere, it happened to be nearly trivial for me. :-) The question is what we have the expertise to support.
- Not realizing exim is setup differently depending on the flavor of Linux. For Debian systems, there is a conf.d folder to place the 3 above mention files into. Not for Centos 7. Evidently some of the syntax is different as well.
I think Debian/Ubuntu is different from RHEL/Fedora/Centos for most things that have many configuration options that are actually used, because of the complex, Debian-specific automation.
- I also did not realize I had some syntax errors in exim.conf that caused exim not to restart. For some reason, the OS did not tell me Exim failed to restart when I used "systemctl restart exim.service". I happen to run "systemctl status exim.service"
That's systemd. I hope somebody else develops expertise in it, since it now seems unavoidable (I avoided it figuring my needs would probably well served by default configuration by the time it became unavoidable ;-).
What I would change in the documentation is to let exim users know to use a valid mail account for posterious to send out messages._
Thanks for these suggestions!
I think all modern MTAs have a sender verify option, so we should make that generic advice, especially since any MX in the system could reject.
Perhaps it is there but it was not apparent to me. I would also mention some more Exim specific settings to modify For example:
"To use Exim4, it should be setup to relay emails from 172.19.199.3 and 172.19.199.2."
I would change the above line to include the actual setting to change in the exim.conf file:
hostlist relay_from_hosts = localhost : 172.19.199.3 : 172.19.199.2 : 172.19.199.1
However the challenge in that is the above setting is for Centos 7.
I think this would be the same for any system using the defaults in the docker images.
I know we don't want to make the documentation too large or unwieldy but I think the above suggestions won't add too much to the weight of the documentation.
Mail is hard and complex, as you know. Size of documentation is unavoidable. Making it useful for troubleshooting is the need, and the hard part.