So instead of the hour I hoped to spend, I spent most of my afternoon yesterday getting mailinglists back up and running. Or so I believed. As an old detergent add used to say the detergent is right, but the temperature is wrong. Apparantly, I'm better of working testdriven for systems administration tasks as well. I had e-mail up and running , and according to all the logfiles I could find (and there are quite some in exim and mailman combined) mailinglists were working, only I as a subcriber wasn't receiving any mail from them.

After taking a long break (tip: take a break when stuff like this doesn't work. It's usually more effective than labouring on). My mail cilent kmail is picky in what mail it downloads, depending on which button I press... So, for the next round I'll take the stuff I did on the command line and copy it into a test script, so I can see if the mail is still working (ordinary users, wildcards, mailinglists). Then I can use that as a basis to improve spam- and virusfiltering as well (spam is apparently still sent out over the mailinglists).

Configuring a mailserver is bewilderingly complex. With only an afternoon spent to upgrade about every package on my web- and mailserver a few years into the future, I may consider myself lucky - on other platforms than debian linux this would take quite a bit more work. Much of the old configuration was taken into consideration by upgrade scripts.

Nevertheless, I'm surprised that what I consider to be a fairly standard setup of mailserver, anti-spam and virus protection and mailinglists takes so much manual configuration. Most configuration I do is copy-paste from websites and mailinglists.

For my own memory and possibly your configuration pleasure, I include some of the details below:

Stepping through why the mailinglists didn't work yet, I found out that the *: willem alias wasn't working anymore. Exim configuration is much different from version 3 to version 4... Surprisingly, handling e-mail with a 'catch all' address does'nt work out of the box (anymore). See this message in the debian mailinglist how to create a catch all address in exim4.

Mailserver configuration seems so different, it is best to start over with the mailinglists and antispam configuration.

This installation log shows some useful defaults (including some nifty spam-filtering and anti-virus addons I haven't used yet) and commands to check the configuration.

exim4 -bV

checks the configuration file, and shows which one is used. Take note that debian generates the config file from one or more files in /etc/exim4 depending on if you choose multiple small files or one large file.