Mail configuration (was: Should I Abandon Mutt and Exim4?)
On 2006-01-12 18:41:52 -0500, Gregory Seidman wrote:
> 1) procmail -- I still don't properly understand how to write my own
> recipes; all of mine are cut and paste or modified from cut
> and paste
It is buggy (I had that confirmed earlier today), I would not recommend
it.
Moreover it is easy to write wrong rules and lose mail (said otherwise,
it lacks a full structured & robust syntax and validation). A few days
ago, I forgot a backslash at the end of a line, and the consequence was
that the following lines procmail didn't understand were skipped, i.e.
procmail assumed that the conditions were matched, and all the mail was
rejected (it was a spam filter).
I'd like very much to have a mail filtering system with at least a
testcase-based validation.
> 2) exim4 w/ maildir -- This took some digging to figure out, but it's a
> matter of the line I mentioned in the previous post
> in the /etc/exim4/update-exim4.conf.conf and running
> update-exim4.conf && /etc/init.d/exim4 reload. The
> line is: dc_localdelivery='maildir_home'
I had to use another method, otherwise exim4 would store the mail in
$HOME/Maildir, although I prefer $HOME/Mail/Maildir (I have several
mailboxes in $HOME/Mail: the main incoming mailbox Maildir and other
mailboxes for mailing-lists). The method was to add
MAILDIR_HOME_MAILDIR_LOCATION='$home/Mail/Maildir'
to /etc/default/exim4.
For personal machines (i.e. with not much mail sent), I also advise to
set QUEUEINTERVAL='5m' because of greylists.
Also there's address rewriting in /etc/email-addresses. For instance,
in my case, where my login is "lefevre":
lefevre: vincent@vinc17.org
> 4) mutt config -- I copied someone else's and gradually customized it. I'm
> using m4 cleverness for mailing list subscriptions.
It is easy to configure (just RTFM, searching for words may be useful),
but there are a few things to know:
* "set envelope_from" may be useful for some mailing-lists.
* "set hidden_host" may be useful, depending on the environment.
* "set use_8bitmime" to avoid quoted-printable.
* "set nowrite_bcc" (as said in Mutt's manual: "Controls whether mutt
writes out the Bcc header when preparing messages to be sent. Exim
users may wish to unset this.").
> 5) spamassassin user_prefs -- I shouldn't discount this, since I had
> developed it over the course of years on a
> system someone else administered, but it was
> incremental improvements.
I did some changes based on experience, but SpamAssassin with its
bayesian filtering is quite slow and takes a lot of memory. I no
longer use it on my 256-MB PowerBook.
> 6) /etc/fetchmailrc -- Building the fetchmailrc, especially figuring out
> how to make sure that it wouldn't overwhelm
> spamassassin or exim4, was a little challenging. I
> used fetchmailconf for it, though, so it was
> moderately easy.
Fetchmail lost my mail in the past. I now use getmail (which is a bit
paranoid about that). It is quite easy to configure, but one of the
points is very unintuitive: a tuple with one item needs a comma (this
is clearly said in the manual and there are examples in it, but when
one looks at other examples and doesn't read the whole manual, it is
easy to make a mistake).
> 7) debconf -- Using debconf to make exim4 use a smarthost was dead easy.
Yes, even when not using a smarthost. I also use netenv and my exim4
configuration depends on the environment, but I had a problem only
during an upgrade.
> 8) software install -- apt-get install, baby!
> spamassassin procmail fetchmail courier-imap mutt
I use my own patched version of Mutt, based on the CVS. :)
--
Vincent Lefèvre <vincent@vinc17.org> - Web: <http://www.vinc17.org/>
100% accessible validated (X)HTML - Blog: <http://www.vinc17.org/blog/>
Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / SPACES project at LORIA
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