Re: What to use as an MTA
Viktor Rosenfeld said:
> in the exim Texinfo file it says:
>
> > Exim is designed to work efficiently on systems that are permanently
> > connected to the Internet and are handling a general mix of mail.
>
> My question is: If I have a machine that's _not_ permanently connected
> to the internet, ie. if I'm using dial-up, is exim still a good choice,
> or are there better MTAs for that purpose.
I've used exim for the last year or so on a box that does dial-on-demand and
it worked quite well. You'll also need to use fetchmail (or similar) to
retrieve your mail from your ISP, since you can't receive it via SMTP when
you're offline (and I assume you don't have a static IP address anyhow).
There are three potential issues that I encountered:
1) In the default Debian install, exim wants to pass mail on immediately and
will bring up the line to do so. Personally, I found this to be a desirable
behaviour, but a lot of people don't like it. I'm sure there are fairly easy
workarounds, though I couldn't tell you what any are.
2) Unless you've registered your own domain and it can accept mail, the
configuration generated by eximconfig won't quite work out of the box.
Specifically, if you tell it you're @isp.net it will assume that all @isp.net
addresses are local, preventing you from sending mail to other users who have
the same ISP as you. If you go through the config by hand, though, the
comments in the generated file make it fairly clear how to fix this.
3) (Not a problem with exim, but rather with dialup access...) Some ISPs
put submit their entire dialup pool to the RBL. If you're using one of these
ISPs, you'll have to use their mail server as a smarthost.
Have fun!
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