Re: exim: misleading package description?

[Kurt Lieber <debian@kirpatrick.com>]

On Thursday 29 November 2001 07:05 pm, cmasters wrote:

> Hope you don't mind the interruption. You may have noticed my slew of
> postings about difficulties with sorting mail. I read your reponse to mean
> that I may not even require the services of procmail, as I ~am~ using exim
> as my MTA. Is this correct? I just want fairly simple pre-sorting of mail
> before I read it with mutt.

Um -- I haven't followed the other threads too closely, so I'm not intimately 
familiar with your predicament.  However, my recommendation is to use 
fetchmail, procmail and mutt together and cut exim out of the picture.  
Procmail has a nasty, ugly, horrible syntax, but it's a more flexible 
filtering program than exim.  Also, once you get up to speed with 
fetchmail/procmail/mutt, you'll likely want to improve upon your filtering 
capabilities to cull spam and other niceties.  That's where you probably want 
to have procmail.

Fetchmail can use procmail as the MDA -- just put:

mda "procmail"

in your .fetchmailrc file and exim should be completely removed from the 
equation.

You'll also want to modify your .procmailrc file to use formail, which will 
regenerate the "From" field so you don't lose your mail.  (see man procmail 
for more info -- look for the -f option)

Note: that's just my opinion on how I would do things  It's worth about as 
much as the e-paper this is printed on.

> No doubt a very helpful book. Unfortunately this "capital" city on the east
> caost of Canada has just discovered that M$ is ~not~ the only OS. I'd have
> to order said book, and wait 4 - 6 weeks for delivery of it. Not sure I can
> go through another few weeks of this dilemma.

One thing that I've learned in my time with linux is that there are always 
472 different ways of doing the exact same damn thing.  I cannot tell you how 
frustrating and wonderful that is, all at the same time.  There is no "one 
right answer" for whatever you're trying to do.  

So, my advice is to pick one way that seems to make the most sense and stick 
with it.  Once you get more comfortable with linux, you can go back and 
change things if you want.  But if you keep jumping around to different 
configuration options, then you'll continue to spin your wheels and never get 
anything done.

--kurt