Jim Cheetham wrote:
I'd say that if you really want to understand what's going on, then sendmail's the only way to go. It's also the safest ( not my words, but those of the top internet security techie at British Telecom ( sorry Syntegra ) ).Jamie Dobbs wrote:
Don't use .forward to redirect to .procmail, remove the .forward file and exim will go straight to .procmail (assuming you're still default).
I tried this an couldn't get it to work that is why I ended up having to use the .forward file
Without seeing your exim.conf file I can't really say wht it didn't work. If you're taking the time to build a mailserver from scratch, it's a good goal to also try to understand *everything* present in the conf file (although not everything that *could* appear!). Exim's online docs are comprehensive, and there are books too. I have one ...
Possibly don't trust probmail to deliver into maildir files. Early versions were not well implemented, and I'm not sure that this has changed. Safecat will do the job nicely.
I've had a Gentoo box running as a mail server using procmail/maildir for
about a year with no issues so far so thought I should be able to do the
same thing udner Debian.
What is 'safecat' and what does it do?
Well, I'm sure the procmail people have done their best to make Maildir delivery safe by now :-) It's just that the original Maildir implementors (djb for the algorithm, that should tell you something) have astronomically high standards, and can find reason to complain about virtually any code except their own.
Safecat accepts a message on stdin, and a description of where the message is to go as arguments. It then guarantees to have the message places into the right place in the message store, atomically, before terminating. Failure is not an option :-) Failure might result in temporary files existing outside the message store, but not within it. Belt and braces. Overkill? Perhaps. It's also general-purpose enough to use in a .forward file to write directly into a Maildir, bypassing procmail entirely.
Mind you, procmail is advised for other reasons :-) Volker will be doing a presentation on procmail in September. I'll be talking about mail in general ... http://clug.inode.co.nz/index.php/20040923presentation
-jim
I'm playing at getting courier up at the moment, just to play with IMAP again. However, it's still in Beta, and has been for years.
Steve
