[CentOS] CentOS Email Wiki and/or mailing list

Fri Feb 29 17:35:25 UTC 2008
John Hinton <webmaster at ew3d.com>

As I hijacked a thread... I thought I'd start this new one. Yes, shame 
on me.

Karanbir Singh wrote:
 > John Hinton wrote:
 >> As a side, I could see blossoming a Wiki area specific to email 
which might
 >> eventually fill out to an extremely robust set of how to's for 
installations
 >> of what amounts to being some of the very hardest things that I've
 >> accomplished with CentOS. Yes SpamAssassin is a powerful tool, but for
 >> instance the default setup that comes out of the box is fairly weak. 
A trip
 >> to the SpamAssassin site will just leave you mostly confused and 
reading for
 >> hours only to find out that what you think is good might not be 
applicable
 >> to your system.

 > Given that, I think it might be a good idea to tackle some of this on
 > the wiki itself rather than needing a list for it. One thing that we are
 > working on at the moment is to try and get a commenting system working
 > on the wiki - so if drive-by users have comments / issues / feedback or
 > even a contribution of some sort in content - they can drop that in
 > there with a near zero barrier to entry. The Editorial Team on the wiki
 > can then evaluate that for inclusion in the main article or leave it as
 > a comment.

This would certainly be a great start. As I see it, a mailsystem Wiki 
should have some specific divisions itself. One would be 'General' and 
then it would likely need 'Sendmail', 'Postfix', 'Qmail' areas. I'm just 
thinking out loud here. I've never done anything on a Wiki. I think a 
good initial layout however would be important. I'm trying to think 
about the gotchas I discover when trying to search for things. It seems 
like it always comes up two out of three and therefore isn't relevant.

Sounds like I've just volunteered myself to participate in this Wiki! 
And yes, I'd be thrilled to!

 >> I think a fair number of the members of this list and the users of 
CentOS
 >> are using it in a server environment and require email. And 
basically, if
 >> you require email that is not exclusively internal to a network, 
spam is a
 >> huge battle which requires constant time... and I mean hours and 
hours and
 >> hours and hours of time. I just spent about 4 days on this again 
this past
 >> week.

 > I am about to take the plunge into this area after about 2 years and
 > completely rework my own anti-spam system. Hope to take loads of notes
 > and get them onto the wiki.

Pros and Cons would be another great area. Revisiting what I had been 
doing this past week took me down a few trails to not being satisfied 
with the end result. Hours spent to a dead end. There are many products 
out there and each seems to have some gotcha. It would be nice to know 
how well they get along with CentOS, how well they perform on various 
levels of load as well as results for accuracy in delivery.

 > We have plenty of resources within the CentOS setup. I dont see hosting
 > something of this nature being too hard. However, i think it might be
 > important to work out what we want to host. IMHO, email is too niche an
 > area to have a dedicated list for it. Something like NetworkServices
 > might be a better target.

I would be happy with anything! I always feel like I am off topic when 
posting email system questions to the CentOS list and I do think it is. 
NetworkServices could be a good place. I'm not sure it's the place for 
network hardware discussions... but I don't know. I haven't looked 
lately at how the mailing list are advertised. A good name for the list 
would certainly help it become more robust or having more users specific 
to that or those topics.

Best,
John Hinton