Please forgive me if this is not an appropriate venue for this type of email, but I wanted to say these things, as it really does mean a lot to me that they be said about courier-mta.
I have been using courier-mta for our main email server for about 5 years now. Used courier version 39, on an old install of yellowdog linux on a very old blue & white G3. Never upgraded courier, because at the time when I installed that beast, it was a nightmare I didn¹t want to repeat for every update (no offense, I hate updates!). Recently the old dog died, and I had to setup a brand spanking new server from the ground up. I decided on fedora for this one, as keeping up to date is, frankly, a breeze compared to what I was used too. Much to my dismay, when among the pickings for email server software, was a montage of crap. I about threw a fit not finding courier-mta as an option for install through 'yum'. However, at that time I wasn't married to keeping with courier, because I had various dislikes with the courier I had been using all those years (v39), and figured maybe something new would be in order. After seeing what I COULD install with yum, I couldn't figure out how to get all the pieces to work together in a way we needed, or what we were used too with courier's flexible abilities. I poured through google like a rabid badger trying to make sense from hundreds of how-to websites and doc pages about getting the various parts to work... All of which none were of the right combination or platform, or did something so very heinous I shuddered at the idea of following their 'directions'. See, for me, I come from a world of simplicity-is-key. If something is so mind blathering overly complex when it shouldn't be, it fusses up my logic circuits and I cannot comprehend the whole point of it. For example, why in the world is it so dang hard for anyone to make an email server package that does what an email server should DO! (all except courier of course, it was a rhetorical question). To me, an email server should 1) accept mail for domains/users, 2) allow those users to get their email, and 3) let those users send email back out to the world. HOW BLEEDING DIFFICULT IS THAT?! Enter Courier-MTA. So, after banging my head on the stupidity barrier of the linux world, I decided to fall back to courier, and just manually install it against my better wishes. Much to my surprise though, I found the "how to build an rpm package" docs on the revamped courier-mta.org website (yeah, I hadn't been there in awhile!). Following the very simple directions to get it packaged into rpm, and then simply installing the rpms I needed, I found courier was in full working order on the server (with the exception of a few key conf file adjustments, and a slight issue with *cough*FAM*cough*). After a few more hours of converting the old 200 client boxes or so into courier, the whole new server was up and running quite well. I was very flabbergasted to find that most of my beefs with courier had been abolished in the various updates from 39 to 50. The whole backscatter handling is by far the most beautiful thing I like, as my old manual scripts I wrote to somewhat handle that crap, were incompatible with the new server. This brings me to the whole point of this rambling email. I wanted to give thanks to Sam Varshavchik for starting and building upon his courier-mta package all these years. His work and dedication stands far and above the worthless junk out there. I seriously believe we will always use courier as our email server software for linux based machines. I see no reason to go the path of hell in dealing with all those other bits and pieces. There's no point! So, Sam, thank you greatly for your hard work and dedication. Now, if we can only convince the idiots over at RedHat to get Courier-MTA put in as an option with yum and the fedora core installers... No offense to any of those idiots who happen to be on this mail-list ;) -Randall Shaw ------------------------------------------------------- SF.Net email is sponsored by: Discover Easy Linux Migration Strategies from IBM. Find simple to follow Roadmaps, straightforward articles, informative Webcasts and more! Get everything you need to get up to speed, fast. http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_idt77&alloc_id492&op=click _______________________________________________ courier-users mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/courier-users
