[CentOS] Re: DKIM

Thu Sep 25 16:58:11 UTC 2008
John Hinton <webmaster at ew3d.com>

Karanbir Singh wrote:
> Toby Bluhm wrote:
>> BTW - very informative thread.
>>
> <thought>
> I wonder if someone might take the bits of info in this thread and put 
> it into a wiki page around Mail Servers and perhaps start a best 
> practices section...
>
> Would 
> http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos#head-49a3d6a9a0c95cff0676b0209eae985780e41678 
> be a good place to consolidate under ?
>
> </thought>
>
This has been an excellent thread. Yet this thread has been only one 
tiny aspect of good email practices. Yet many folks 'respectfully' did 
not understand a lot that was corrected in several of the posts in just 
this one very basic aspect of email.

This leads me to ask for a CentOS mailing list for email....

For webserver/mailserver admins, it seems that email is by far the 
largest issue, spanning everything from DNS to server loads to choosing 
(and the configuration of) many applications... some not upstream 
packages. It's easy to get into a mess and not have a good way back to 
the base. MailScanner comes to mind. Great software, but dependency 
hell. I found that I could have used many Perl packages from the Dag 
repo instead of how MailScanner chose to do its install. This resulted 
in a much cleaner install with regards to package management. If there 
had been a CentOS email, mailing list, much of this could have been 
headed off and perhaps more wiki's would spring out of it? Yet again, 
the above is just one other tiny aspect of reliable email service on a 
CentOS server.

When I go off to other software and to their mailing list, the answers 
are more about 'how to get it to work' instead of 'how to get it to best 
co-exist within CentOS'. In fact, many hate rpm and insist on totally 
sidestepping it. Yes, sometimes it's a PITA, but most of the time 
staying within upstream keeps me out of trouble which is why I guess 
most of us are using CentOS in the first place.

This was what led to my thought for a CentOS specific mailing list for 
email. Yes, there is a huge amount of data out there, just like this 
thread. But these types of threads clog a general list and I've always 
hesitated to post any email issues here. Yet, it is extremely difficult 
to drill down a search to the good information with regards to CentOS 
specific help or good practices with regards to email. Google anyway you 
want.... you either miss what's good or get way the heck to much 
information that is not helpful to CentOS, in spite of using CentOS as a 
part of the search.... yes, even in quotes. And, on a list like this you 
get to know who to trust. General searches often times yield idiotic 
suggestions or old practices. The target is constantly moving. Large 
providers are constantly making 'new rules'. My clients don't care, they 
just want to be able to send an email to their clients no matter the 
receiving system.

So I again ask for this list... I wonder how many feel that it would be 
worth the trouble? But I don't really want to ask anything more of the 
CentOS team, as they are IMO doing plenty right now. I am very appreciative.

John Hinton