Re: Gnus with Exim

["Steven E. Harris" <seh@panix.com>]

David Abrahams <dave@boost-consulting.com> writes:

> I'm just putting smart_route first at the moment.  I figure dnslookup
> might work somewhere that my regular servers are unreachable.

Sure, that's fine, so long as you don't mind "maintaining" the similar
settings in more than one router.

> Cool, I was thinking something like that might be possible

I'm pretty sure the Debian people pushed or at least suggested this
option to the exim maintainers; I had never noticed it until about a
month ago.

> Actually that's what I have running right now.  I was having bad
> smtp response this morning so I decided to bite the bullet and set
> everything up as best I could before hearing from you.

Is the two-host route list working properly?

> [BTW, how do you make those nice callouts?]

It's boxquote.el¹. I used the functions `boxquote-region' and
`boxquote-title' where appropriate.

> I was thinking that the ideal would be 
>
> ,----
> | smart_route:
> |   driver = manualroute
> |   domains = ! +local_domains
> |   transport = remote_smtp
> |   .include /etc/exim_smarthost_route_list
> `----
>
> with
>
> ,----[ /etc/exim_smarthost_route_list ]
> | route_list = * smtp.rcn.com:smtp.boost-consulting.com
> `----
>
> or
>
> ,----[ /etc/exim_smarthost_route_list ]
> | route_list = * smtp.boost-consulting.com:smtp.rcn.com
> `----
>
> depending on which server had succeeded the last time.  But I don't
> know how to do that.  Parsing the log file?  That's a frightening
> thought.

Yow. I don't know how to do that either. You'd need some kind of hook
function that ran upon success or failure when sending. Cursory
reading of the exim manual suggests that perhaps with some chaining of
transports one could write something to a file based on whether some
other transport succeeded or failed, but for now it's beyond me. I
think that's one to take to a dedicated exim mailing list.

By the way, not this helps much, but the order of the hosts mentioned
in the route_list can be randomized.²

> Fortunately I don't have that problem.

Well, we'll leave that solution in the archives for some other unlucky
person.


Footnotes: 
¹ http://www.davep.org/emacs/boxquote.el
² http://www.exim.org/exim-html-4.50/doc/html/spec_20.html#SECT20.6

-- 
Steven E. Harris