Configuring Sendmail On Jaguar

Spock the Baptist writes "This website's recent article on the O'Reilly Network is by James Duncan Davidson, speaking at the recent O'Reilly Mac OS X Conference. PowerBook, and iBook owners will likely be intrested in this article, as sending e-mail from multiple locations is less trouble when done via sendmail rather than a remote mail serever. Also, if your ISP's mail server goes down you'll still be able to send outgoing e-mail which can be quite handy."

Recent?

[Arjen]

If recent means "about a month ago" then you're right.

how about postfix ?

[mAIsE]

anyone know of a good howto on postfix on OSX ?

Re:how about postfix ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Install/run Webmin....it will make admin'ing Postfix as easy as it gets.

Something of note....

[GoRK]

Relying on this (a local MTA) to send your mail is in general a terrible idea for dialup or consumer broadband accounts. First, many ISP's block or filter off-network port 25 traffic to prevent spammers from exploiting their service. Secondly, there are many many more ISP's who filter spam using dialup user lists - lists of IP addresses that are assigned to dialup or "home" broadband DSL/Cable/Wireless users. I personally know of over 50,000 mailboxes that would never recieve a message sent from an MTA on a dialup user list. I imagine that there are many more.

The proper way to run a remote MTA via your dialup or home broadband account is to set up (or have your isp configure) a permanently-connected upstream MTA that will allow you to use it as a smarthost via authenticated SMTP or SMTP/SSL. Tunneling this connection over ssh is a fairly sure-fire way to get around ISP's who block or redirect port 25 traffic to their own SMTP server. The only problem is that by the time you get that kind of a connection set up, you realize you could have solved your problem by tunneling your local port 25 to a "real" smtp server via ssh a lot easier than the headache you just went through setting up the godawful beast of sendmail.

Re:Something of note....

[PD]

It's a trade-off. I couldn't filter squat until I started running my own mail server on my my DSL connection.

I don't see spam anymore, but I see lots of evidence in my mail logs that people have tried to send me some.

And I haven't noticed any of my mail bouncing because I run on a DSL line.

BTW, I use Exim as my MTA. Can't recommend it highly enough - it just works.

Re:Something of note....

[Pengo]

Spam filters don't filter by recieving host, but by source host. I have the same configuration, I don't think anyone in the world would have any problems sending me an email as long as my isp doesn't change the IP address of my cable modem before I can change it on my DNS servers.

but, sending them is another story. Basically I send through my isp mail and I recieve on my local solaris box running sendmail & imap.

Even if the ISP blocks at port 25, thats usually outgoing and not incomming , and so recieving mail assuming your using dyn-dns or something of the sort, or have a static ip... shouldn't be a problem.

cheers

Re:Something of note....

[macdaddy]

Obviously you've never tried to email me or my users.

And if you want to run qmail, which you should...

[Silas]

There are some good instructions here [bluedot.net] for setting up qmail on OS X.

qmail [qmail.org] is the #2 MTA on the Internet, and the fastest growing. Highly recommended over sendmail, with distinct superiority in issues of security, reliability, and efficiency.

What's the Advantage?

[reallocate]

Why would a singleton home user of a dialup or broadband ISP want to do this? What's the advantage?

I've done it on standalone Linux boxes. My mail went out and came in, just like I did when it wasn't running a mail server.

Is there a trade-off for the added complexity?

Re:What's the Advantage?

[Pengo]

Hmm.. for me it's http://www.spamassassin.org

The # 1 reason to run your own mail server. :)

I was getting 40+ spams per day, and now I don't get any.. period. end of story.

It took me a full day to get it all setup (email, spam assassin, etc), but once I got through it all.. configured imap, etc. It was pretty sweet.

I have it running on my solaris box under my desk, but it would easily be installable onto any unix/linux/osx/whatever box you have kicking around.

Cheers

Re:What's the Advantage?

[thatguywhoiam]

Speaking of spam... (and, slightly OT, but what the hell)

There's an ability in OS X Mail that I've not seen anywhere else. You can bounce mail. Maybe it's nothing new, but it's sure new to me. There's even a little icon you can put in the toolbar.

This, by itself, has single-handedly reduced my spam intake by 99%. Too bad Apple's own rules won't allow me to configure a spam-tastic auto-bouncing rubber inbox.

Re:What's the Advantage?

[gnuadam]

Not new, you're right. pine (the old classic command line, well ncurses, mail client) has a bounce feature.

Re:What's the Advantage?

[matthew_brock]

The advantage for laptop users is that you don't have to keep altering your smarthost/relay settings. You can just set your smarthost to 127.0.0.1 and then never have to touch it again. Otherwise you have to keep changing the smarthost depending on whether you're using your dialup at home, or whether you're at your friend's house, or whether you want to send personal mail whilst you're at work, etc...

don't settle for sendmail

[amosb]

If you're going to put any effort into setting up a mail server on your Darwin/OS X machine, then put in a little extra work and switch to postfix. And lucky for you, Graham Orndorff has put together a comprehensive tutorial [stepwise.com] on postfix (also imapd, fetchmail, and stunnel) for OS X on stepwise [stepwise.com]. This is a man who background includes 3 years at NeXT and 4 years as mail architect at WebTV [webtv.com]. In other words, you should trust his opinion. And he even writes great documentation!

Re:don't settle for sendmail

[macdaddy]

That's funny. I've been using Sendmail for years and have never had any trouble. If all newbies gave in to the advice of those that simply don't know how to use Sendmail, Sendmail would never get used. Then again neither would Solaris or Linux.

security concern

[warren69]

perhaps suggesting home users (dsl, cable, and dial up users) to use their own MTA is poor as far as security goes. I can see perhaps if you are having a lot of problems with your ISP's outoing mail, but I'd think the security concern would outway the normal service level.