initial mail setup proposal was: Re: Please participate in popularity-contest
Hello,
On Tue, Aug 10, 2004 at 11:37:04AM +0200, Tore Anderson wrote:
> Besides, base even includes an MUA. I certainly expect an MUA to be
> able to send to remote destinations
> [...]
> Then there's popularity-contest [...] I think reportbug also deserves mention here [...]
> endeavour to have working with an absolute minimum of user configuration
> required.
>
> * Andreas Metzler
> > In my opinion a sane default setting for a fully-flegded MTA like
> > Exim would be to ask if the user had any specific SMTP submission service
> > at his ISP or wherever he'd like to use, and if not - mail is sent
> > directly using DNS/SMTP. YMMV.
In my experience installing Debian for quite a varied number of people,
most need something similar to the mail account setup in most graphical
MUAs - most common setups here in Germany would use a SMTP submission
service with SMTP-after-POP or SMTP-auth via TLS. Unfortunately, this
would "bloat" the d-i setup with questions for account, password and the
same for POP3. Best for those users would probably be configuring fetchmail
in conjunction with exim.
This group is closely followed by those which use pure webmail (those
would probably be best served by local delivery only). Since they are
mostly inexperienced users, making it easy for them should be the
default.
Users which use DNS/SMTP are almost always able and knowledgable enough
to do a eximconfig to configure everything to their liking post-install
(or even manually).
> Again, I'm aware that it is possible to override the default values
> and thus enable all of Exim's functionality. What I'm arguing is that
> «internet site» should be the default preselected choice, just like it is
> in the Exim 3 package. That way remote email will work in most cases
> without demanding that the user must configure the MTA differently than
> the default.
I'd argue that most users expect mail regarding their new Debian system
to land in their main inbox. They do not even know that their new
desktop system has its own mail system. And at least for students, most
live behind a NAT router, so port 25 is not reachable from the outside
anyway.
Proposal:
1. We're now going to setup your email system.
( ) Local mail system (if you have no Internet connection or pure Webmail)
( ) Send and fetch mail via SMTP/POP3/IMAP
( ) Advanced configuration (also for modem/ISDN users directly
connection to the Internet)
If you're unsure, choose the first.
(Advanced configuration would lead to the well-known exim4 question set,
local mail system would just enable local delivery. If not:)
2. fetching mail
( ) fetch mail from POP3 mail server
( ) fetch mail from IMAP mail server
[ ] secure connection (encrypted SSL/TLS)
[ ] keep mail on server
(then, asks for server name/username/password. If the last option is
checked, the various tricks to detect new mail in the POP3 case should
be employed)
3. sending mail
[ ] secure connection (encrypted SSL/TLS)
[ ] needs authentication (username and password)
[ ] need to fetch mails before being able to send (POP-before-SMTP)
(asks for server name, ask for username/password if checked)
I am not sure whether this is easy enough though and I hope I'm not
missing something obvious :-( This is obviously sarge+1 stuff.
-Malte
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