At 14:10 2003-07-09 -0700, Noarmun E. Mailer wrote:
The URL posted by Nancy McGough is great and I have bookmarked it.
However, I am using procmail as my local mailer. This page is for end
users.
Nancy's site is indeed set up for people _using_ procmail, not necessarily
for sysadms trying to set up their systems. There are MANY variables in
doing that (the variety of MTAs for example), and the number of sysadms out
there is considerably smaller than the number of end users who might want
to use procmail. I can't help but suspect that it is called the "Procmail
Quick Start" for a reason.
Professional sysadms have traditionally been the type of person to read the
documentation included with source distributions of the tools which they
compile and install onto their systems, and as such, the answers to these
questions tend to be readily available to them.
When you get into "package" installations - such as RedHat certainly
promotes to make installation of tools more "carefree" for the admin who is
more of a user than an administrator, then the details are often omitted,
and the operational defaults often differ from those specified in a
source-based distribution. I'm not knocking user-admin types, but
increasingly there are people tackling administrative jobs which they've
got absolutely no qualifications for, and simply don't have the foundation
of knowledge for finding answers to issues which admins are frequently
faced with.
Owing to the sheer number of distributions, and how some of them seem to
arbitrarily change attributes on a whim (and the version numbers they
report for things often differ from those of the software developer - a
"patchlevel" suffix is often found tacked to the tail end of versions of
programs on some distributions, keeping the version number from correlating
to the version number of the software as released by its developer), it
isn't feasable to attempt to provide a single reference source on how each
distro (or version of) needs to be configured. It's easy enough to
document the LOCAL_PROCMAIL setting for Sendmail though, provided users use
the M4 style config files, instead of hacking at their .cf directly, as
some do.
The briefest of searches turned up the following documents pertaining to
configuration of procmail as LDA on several of the most pupular *nix MTAs:
Sendmail:
<http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=bbr68f%242c7f%245%40hedeland.org>
Exim:
<http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=E11oVNu-0007Qn-00%40under.eng.cp.net>
Qmail:
<http://mirror.ncsa.uiuc.edu/procmail/ssjaaa/pm-tips-body.html>
Go to §20.11
Postfix:
<http://mirror.ncsa.uiuc.edu/procmail/ssjaaa/pm-tips-body.html>
Go to §3.5
The answers seem available if people look for them.
Anyone have favorite URLs aimed at setting procmail as the LDA?
The documentation of my chosen MTA generally works quite well. Sendmail
for instance is pretty clear about how to go about doing this with a
FEATURE setting. If you check the "Bat" book - effectively, the print
manual for Sendmail - you'll see that the Sendmail authors actually
recommend procmail as an LDA for the security-conscious.
---
Sean B. Straw / Professional Software Engineering
Procmail disclaimer: <http://www.professional.org/procmail/disclaimer.html>
Please DO NOT carbon me on list replies. I'll get my copy from the list.
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