[olug] Configuring Sendmail

[Sean Kelly]

On Mon, Jan 24, 2005 at 07:15:16PM -0800, Sean Edwards wrote:
> In an effort to reduce spam originating on their own
> network, Cox only allows their servers to send
> outbound email.
>   
> One option is to configure your email server as a
> smarthost, using one of your seven Cox id's.  What
> this means is when your server goes to send a message,
> it actually connects with a user account to the Cox
> server, and the Cox server does the send rather than
> your server.

Last I checked, Cox didn't require SMTP-AUTH in order to send mail through
their mail servers (smtp.central.cox.net, etc). All you need is to be in
their IP space, and they will allow you to push mail through their server.
Am I misunderstanding something?

> I am sure you will get other replies with other valid
> solutions.

What I did while I was using Cox over the summer was to have one of my
remote Postfix MTAs listen on port 2525 for me and I just used it as a
relay. That way, I could use my own MTA behind Cox and also have control of
the server I relayed through.

...
> > passwords for my board.  This is the one feature I
> > have not been able to
> > get working.  I have installed cyrus SASL and
> > modified sendmail to use
> > authentication using the PLAIN mechanism (which I'm
> > not sure is the
> > right one).

I'm missing the point of the SASL and so forth. Like I said above, I don't
believe Cox needs any of this stuff for you to send mail through their
mail servers.

If you want to have your Sendmail push mail through the Cox SMTP server,
all you need to do is define a smart relay host in sendmail.cf (or in the
.mc if you generate your .cf that way).

The simplest way is to find a line similar to:
# "Smart" relay host (may be null)
DS

and tack something on there:

# "Smart" relay host (may be null)
DS smtp.central.cox.net

If you generate your .cf from a .mc, then you want to tack something like
this into your sendmail.mc file:

define(`SMART_HOST', `smtp.central.cox.net')


For the record, I don't really like Sendmail much. In my opinion, Postfix
can do 99.999% of what most people do with Sendmail, and te config file is
soooo much more sane.

> > All I want it to do is send mail to
> > that smtp account.  I
> > have all the mail for the relative domain sent to
> > the same account and
> > check it via web.

This part isn't clear to me. Explain in more detail?

-- 
Sean Kelly         | PGP KeyID: D2E5E296
smkelly at zombie.org | http://www.zombie.org