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Critique: An article I've written

Posted: Mon May 28, 2007 11:34 am
by Chris Corbyn
I just finished an article on how to set up virtual email accounts with Exim and Dovecot.

http://www.w3style.co.uk/virtual-domain ... nd-dovecot

It's not often I get to write technical articles other than software documentation so I was just looking for some feedback really :) This won't make any sense to anyone who's not comfortable/experienced with linux. I can't really help that because it's quite an advanced topic.

Posted: Wed Jun 13, 2007 6:41 pm
by redmonkey
I found the article to be a bit too verbose for my liking. I don't consider myself be any kind of expert linux server admin but like to think I'm fairly proficient, I don't do much with mailservers and as a result Exim is probably the one 'standard' server package that I know least about. But even considering that I found some areas of the article just weren't needed in my opimion.

Stuff like, make sure Exim is installed and no other mailserver software is running. I would hope that the kind of people dealing with mailserver config would have enough savy to A) Not try to config an app that's not actually installed on the machine and B) be aware that running different server packages listening on the same port(s) will lead to some crazy stuff going on.

I also thought (and especially given the verbosity of the article) that glossing over hashing passwords in the passwd file is a complete oversight. You strongly advise against using plain text passwords but you don't offer any examples of creating hashed passwords. You merely state that there are plenty of apps available on the net to help with that. I was expecting at least a recommendation of one (or more) of these apps that may be worth looking at (or perhaps link to some external resource on the subject).

Other than that, it seemed fine. Although in all honesty, if I had stumbled across your article because I was looking for info about setting up virtual mail accounts I think I would've probably just scanned through the article rather than actually reading it.

Posted: Thu Jun 14, 2007 9:51 am
by alex.barylski
Sweet. :)

I've been trying to get Postfix and Dovecot setup on my dedicated host for weeks now. I eventually gave up and settled for a email hosting company. :)

I'll certainly have a go at reading this when I have more time, but the first few paragraphs were good. :)