Re: Exim

["Pierre A. Humblet" <Pierre dot Humblet at ieee dot org>]

> >> var/exim/spool/
> 
> > I would prefer var/spool/exim...

OK, I have no preferences. I was just trying to follow the instructions
from the Cygwin web:
--localstatedir=/var
That makes a lot of sense to me. /var/exim denotes the fact that the files
under it are private to exim, which is the case.
/var/spool/exim looks more like shared files.
 
> >> var/exim/log/
> 
> > and var/log/exim (or var/spool/exim/log) to follow the RPM conventions
> > that I found on rpmfind.net.
> 
> The first, please.

cygrunsrv will save stdout in /var/log/exim.log, which could cause confusion
with /var/log/exim. So I prefer the second (or /var/exim/log).

Nobody said anything about the mail spool directory (where the user mboxes are):
/var/mail (and not /var/spool/mail). Is that OK (it's under user control anyway)?
Isn't /var/mail the mutt default?

> >> etc/postinstall/exim.sh
> 
> > What about the creation of the exim user, mail group, etc. in the above?
> > I know that it's a lot of work, but it should help to mitigate the
> > support effort.

I am very reluctant to have an automatic script create groups or users without
any warning. On the other hand having that in a user-run script such as 
/bin/ssh-host-config is OK.
The difficulty is that there are many ways to operate a mailer. For example
when ntsec is off, nothing special needs to be done.
Even when ntsec is on, I don't think it is necessary to create users or 
groups to operate securely, even if it's traditional to do so.
To minimize the support effort it may be wise to set all permissions to 777
by default and let users tighten them if desired. Even that may be paranoid,
I don't expect users to write to the list simply because they have a 
permission problem. Exim provides good feedback on that.

exim requires only two things to start:
- Have /etc/aliases (it will complain if it's missing). The RFC requires 
that postmaster be defined but exim doesn't check. The automatic script
can create the file, but it can't decide how to map postmaster.
- have the correct FQHN in the exim.conf, if the automatic method doesn't
give the correct name (e.g. that's the case with my isp at home).

Pierre