[ale] Local email w/o sendmail daemon on RHL 9

[Bob Toxen]

On Wed, Nov 19, 2003 at 09:55:48PM -0500, Mike Millson wrote:
> Has anyone figured out how to send email to a local account w/o running
> the sendmail daemon on Red Hat 9? 
Weeeeell, edit your /etc/mail/sendmail.cf file to cause that POS MSA
daemon to listen on IP 127.0.0.1 instead of its default 0.0.0.0.  Then
add a IP Tables/IP Chains rule to allow traffic to 127.0.0.1 only from
127.0.0.1 or your NIC's IP address.  This will accomplish the same thing.
Btw, this was a really stupid design choice on Sendmail Inc.'s choice, IMHO.

> This is sendmail v8.12.x. There is something called a Mail Submission
> Agent (MSA) and now there is a submit.mc in addition to sendmail.mc.
> Also, there is something called sm-client that starts when sendmail
> starts. As if things weren't confusing enough...

> When I enter the following:
> /usr/lib/sendmail -v -t <<f
> From: localaccount
> To: localaccount
> Subject: test
> f

> I get:
> localaccount... Connecting to [127.0.0.1] via relay...
> localaccount... Deferred: Connection refused by [127.0.0.1]

> I can see the message is queued up in /var/spool/clientmqueue/

> Then if I start sendmail (service sendmail start) the mail gets
> delivered to /var/mail/localaccount.

> Is there no way to send mail to a local account w/o having sendmail
> started?

> Mike

Bob Toxen
bob at verysecurelinux.com               [Please use for email to me]
http://www.verysecurelinux.com        [Network&Linux/Unix security consulting]
http://www.realworldlinuxsecurity.com [My book:"Real World Linux Security 2/e"]
Quality Linux & UNIX security and SysAdmin & software consulting since 1990.

"Microsoft: Unsafe at any clock speed!"
   -- Bob Toxen 10/03/2002