Re: sendmail

["Brune, Charlie" <Charlie.Brune@anheuser-busch.com>]

I'm running RedHat 7.1 and use sendmail as my MTA (mail transfer agent).  I.E.,
it's what talks to the outside world to send/receive email from other post
offices.

I have pop3 installed so that I can get my mail using Outlook, which is running
on another (Windows 98) computer that I have.

The good news is that sendmail comes basically ready-to-go if you install it on
RedHat.

A couple of things that bit me:

#1. You will save yourself a lot of heartache if you name your machine the same
as the outside world will be sending the email to.  I.E., if people will be
sending you mail at casey@fred.org, then name your machine "fred.org".  There's
probably a way to get around this problem, but for me it made sense to change
the machine name.

#2. Do NOT use any uppercase letters when assigning user id's.  I had one set up
as "Charlie" and couldn't send email to it.  Then Steve set me straight:  "Any
userids that have uppercase letters will have email sent to them cheerfully
ignored."  Yup, that was it.  I renamed the account to "charlie" and I'm off to
the races.

#3. If you want to be able to send email through your server from an outlook
client on another machine, then your server will have to be told that it's okay
to relay the mail.  My other machine's name is "peanut.cdb".  So... I had to get
into the "/etc/mail/access" file and add a line that said "peanut.cdb  RELAY".
After you change the "access" file, type "make" to rebuild the "access.db" file
in the same directory.  Then type "service sendmail restart" to have the changes
read by sendmail.

To get a "pop3" server going, you'll need to install the "imap" rpm.  Then, get
into /etc/inetd.d directory and look at the pop3 files.  You'll need to change
the "disable" switch from "yes" to "no".  Then restart xinetd.  (One way to do
this is to type "service xinetd restart".

One last thing... recent versions of sendmail are set up to not relay anything.
(I don't think I said that correctly, but I'm close).
To change this (back to the way it *used* to work by default):
  -- Edit the "/etc/mail/sendmail.m4" file and you'll see that there are
comments in there about what line to comment out.  You comment out a line by
putting "dnl" at the start of the line.  ("dnl" means that the rest of the line
is a comment).
  -- The "sendmail.m4" file is used to build the config file that sendmail
actually uses, called "sendmail.cf".  "sendmail.cf" is in the /etc directory.
Make a copy of it ("cp sendmail.cf sendmail.cf.cya").  Then rebuild it by typing
"m4 <sendmail.m4 >/etc/sendmail.cf".
  -- Do the "service sendmail restart" command again to restart sendmail.

Whew!  I think I've made it look harder than it really is.  Thanks for reading
this far.  8-)  If something doesn't make sense, reply here or send me an email
directly.

(Of course, you sysadmin types probably have been hovering your mouse over the
<reply> button for the last two paragraphs.  Try not to be too scary!)  8-)

Regards,
Charlie


-----Original Message-----
From: Casey Boone [mailto:ophidian@mychoice.net]
Sent: Sunday, September 30, 2001 10:08 PM
To: silug-discuss@silug.org
Subject: sendmail


anyone know of an easy to use config util for sendmail?

my employer is forcing me to give myself a crash course in setting up a full
out linux server, but im having some trouble setting up sendmail

also does sendmail do pop3? or is it smtp only?

Casey Boone

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