> But in the choice of words I would say because it is a small machine > used as a thin client where you don't need it, and not because it is a > laptop. On my laptop I do queue email and I do read and reply to mail > while offline. My laptop is not a thin client. Just being a laptop > doesn't cause a strong indicator that it shouldn't run an MTA. But > your use model of using it only as a thin client is a different > indicator. Just a disagreement over the choice of words here. :-)
Ah, good point; your wording is much more accurate. :) While it'd be nice to have a queue for offline email, it's not really something I ever need. > Exim is a fine MTA. In my opinion Exim and Postfix are the two known > good standard MTAs. Personally I would install Postfix and configure > it for "Local only" which is one of the standard installation options > and therefore very simple to set up. I am sure that Exim has an > equivalent but don't know it off the top of my head. Then with > whichever MTA you chose things should "just work" for you. I took your advice and spent about a week with Postfix. I was really impressed; it's an excellent MTA, and I've sinced moved my server over to it. On my laptop I had it configured to hand off to a smarthost and was having a lot of trouble keeping my emails out of spam bins; after looking at some of the headers, I have a good idea of why it was happening, but ultimately decided that it wasn't worth sorting out at this point (lots of stuff going on and I need my laptop functional). Since nullmailer was suggested so much, I looked at it as well. It seems great as a basic relay, but it lacked a few of the features that I really wanted (namely changing the SMTP server based on the From: header). Ultimately I went with esmtp (esmtp and esmtp-run in Apt). It's a basic relay that's easy to configure and has a few nice features (TLS, From: header based SMTP). It can also handle local delivery via procmail; while it doesn't support aliases or .forwards, you can get the same effect with some procmail configuration. There's also a script to implement a rudimentary queue. I haven't tried it yet, but it seems like a nice, albeit simple, way of accomplishing offline email. Thanks for the advice everyone! Now I can get back to things that *aren't* reading massive amounts of man pages and configuring MTAs... -- -Eli
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