[Pkg-exim4-users] Exim4 with local network as well as smarthost (longish post)

[Dave Witbrodt]

Jutta Zalud wrote:
> Dave Witbrodt wrote:
> 
>>> Most mail needs to go to an (isp) smarthost with FROM headers
>>> rewritten. But local mail within the network needs to be delivered
>>> directly with headers unchanged.
>>    I accomplished this, but had to rewrite some of the Exim rules in 
>> order to do it.
>>
> ----
> 
>>    If you feel my situation is similar enough to yours, I would be happy 
>> to share the changes I made to get local emails to pass through 
>> "webserver" unmodified, but external emails having their headers 
>> rewritten so that the reply address is the correct email address of my 
>> ISP account.
> 
> Dave, would you be willing to share it with the list? I have been 
> looking for such a solution also for quite a time. The only point where 
> I disagree with you is, that I don't think this is a very rare setup.
> Just think of a company where every person should be able to communicate 
> with every other person locally but only a few official e-mail addresses 
> (like office at example.com or sales at example.com) should be used for 
> communication with the outside world.

   I don't feel strongly enough about this to pursue the debate very 
much farther, but your reasoning doesn't convince me that a very high 
percentage of machines running Exim need a configuration that the Debian 
Exim Maintainers haven't provided for with their debconf questions.  My 
guess is that the overwhelming majority of the machines where Exim is 
installed have owners that don't even realize Exim is present.
   Having narrowed down the percentage to the people who know it's 
present, most of them (if they are using Debian or a derivative of 
Debian) are served by the default configuration + debconf questions.  Of 
this group of people, if they are even aware that they have needs that 
are not served by the Exim configuration provided by the Debian 
maintainers, then they probably already have experience configuring 
MTA's... so they dump Exim and install Postfix or Sendmail.  (Not 
because Exim is inferior, but because they have experience with some 
other MTA.)

   In short, Debian users who pursue usage of Exim as far as you and I 
are talking about are rare extremists!  ;)

   Having said that, I am posting the information you requested in a 
separate email... with a subject that hopefully will catch some more 
attention:

       Exim4 home network configuration with smarthost
       but no local header rewrites

Look for that one for my response to your question.


DW