Re: Running mail and web servers on UNIX

Hey David,

thank you for your follow-up. Had a good read.

A bit of a rant was supposed to follow here - but for some reason I just 
tried to remove sendmail from my current opensuse 15.6 and to my 
surprise it just worked without any issues. Well, the removal of the 
package that was - as for what broke: from what I noticed only php's 
mail() function. It results in a simple line in apache's error_log: 
/usr/sbin/sendmail not found - while mail() still returns 0 for success.
But as I had it setup for some project I never implemented only I can 
live without it - for now. And if I feel the need for it I simply 
install sendmail, put the nullclient config in place - modify the 
service file to remove the -bd option to make it stop listen on port 25 
- and back to normal.
So, from that point - seems even OpenSuse doesn't really require 
sendmail as a hard dependency anymore which makes setup of James even 
easier.

I was also looking into a way to setup a replication from between my 
main root and my home backup but the guice built lacks the fetchmail 
part and I haven't looked into the cluster built, yet.
Another option could be simple mysql-replication which would work even 
both ways - but actually I also could write up some java code monitoring 
my about 30 mailboxes for various services and sync them this way.

Although I will stick to James I may look into your guide and give it a 
shot in a VM just to see if I'm finally experienced enough to get it 
working after about 10 years of having it tried last time.

Have a good one everyone.

Matt


Am 25.01.25 um 10:02 schrieb David Matthews:
> hi Matt
>
> It may be that you run some software that pulls in a sendmail/sendmail clone that I do not? I use bsd-mailx to make cron happy and I never had any trouble doing an "apt delete exim4" (in my case) and everything just carrying on with James listening on port 25.
>
> You could also remove the executable bit from exim4/sendmail to stop it competing with a James install for the smtp port(s).
>
> To be honest, I never ran James in production although I had it running nicely on a testing machine. If anything it seemed to me as newbie even more scary than exim4 and dovecot and it does conflict rather with the unix notion of doing *one* thing well. A mail exchanger on its own is already doing a ton of things, without combining it with your imap server! And either exim4 or dovecot alone are scary enough for me :-)
>
> I've built up a store of experience with those devils that I was loath to abandon, hence why I didn't stick with james. But anyway, it's good to be around people that persist in running their own mail exchangers; I'm astonished at the great mass of technical people that think it's too hard to bother with. Sure there's a lot of fiddling to be done to get everything working properly, but it is do-able and generally, once it's done it's done!
>
> --
> David Matthews
> [email protected]
>
>
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