[rhelv6-beta-list] Missing or removed package - Exim

[Nico Kadel-Garcia]

On Wed, Jun 30, 2010 at 2:19 PM, Eugene Tay <etay at redhat.com> wrote:
> Is Exim going to make it into RHEL6 or is it missing by accident? I don't
> see it being one of the deprecated packages in the release notes.


I've asked RedHat formally in a trouble ticket. Exim has number of
features going for it:

* It's lightweight. (Unlike cyrus, which has a kitchen sink of
requirements and dependencies.)
* Its configuration files are sensible. (Unlike sendmail, whose macro
expansions from .mc files to generate .cf files are famously and
fiendishly fragile and which cannot actually generate the full range
of options for .cf files.)
* It can handle "smarthost" behavior correctly, allowing all local
aliases and .forwards to be processed but still sending all email to
unqualified usernames to be envelope rewritten as "user at example.com"
and relayed to the smarthost. (cyrus, who knows, configuring it such a
nightmair, sendmail doesn't forward unqualified addresses, postfix
won't process local aliases if you smarthost configure it so that all
email which normally be aliased to root winds up with its original
target usernames, etc.)
* Exim, by default, also drops all root email on fhe floor. Given the
tendency of unread cron jobs to accumulate in /var/spool/mail on
unconfigured systems, and bounces to overwhelm /var/spool/mail/, this
is actually reasonable behavior until an alias or .forward for the
root user is configured.

If anyone would find my exim configuration notes useful for these
reasons, let me know.