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

[Mike Millson]

After much research, here are some things I think I know about Sendmail
v8.12, the variety that comes w/ RHL 9:

The only way to send email without running the daemon is to use the Mail
Submission Agent (MSA). The configuration for the MSA is specified in
/etc/mail/submit.cf (sendmail.cf is only relevant to sendmail in MTA
mode). So, if you are not running the daemon, you make config changes to
/etc/mail/submit.mc, then run:

make -C /etc/mail

An MSAs job is to hand off your mail to an MTA. So, if you want to send
an email to a local account (e.g. you are running logwatch or some other
program that sends email reports), you have to run an MTA locally. And
the only way to have a local sendmail MTA is to run the daemon. A big
difference in earlier versions of sendmail.

If you want to send email to a remote MTA, just replace "127.0.0.1" in
the following line in the default submit.mc file with the IP address or
host name of the MTA:

FEATURE(`msp', `[127.0.0.1]')

Also, I found that you need to give your MSA a valid domain or the MTA
will reject the message. So, here is a sample config that would need to
be added to the end of submit.mc:

MASQUERADE_AS(`yourdomain.com')
FEATURE(`masquerade_envelope')
FEATURE(`allmasquerade')
FEATURE(`msp', `[192.168.1.44]')

So, given all this, maybe it's easier to just run the damn daemon. That
seems to be the only way sendmail behaves like earlier versions.

Or maybe it's time I try postfix...

Mike

On Thu, 2003-11-20 at 12:56, Mike Millson wrote:
> On Thu, 2003-11-20 at 09:47, Chris Ricker wrote:
> > On Wed, 19 Nov 2003, Bob Toxen wrote:
> > 
> > > 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.
> 
> The way I understand it, sendmail.cf is used when sendmail is running in
> MTA mode. And w/ v8.12, I think the daemon is MTA mode because only the
> daemon has privileges to write to /var/spool/mqueue.
> 
> When sendmail is stopped, mail is queued in /var/spool/clientmqueue,
> which is where is looks like mail handled by the MSA is put.
> 
> To me it looks like the only way to send mail in v8.12 is using MSA. And
> sendmail in MSA mode uses the new submit.cf file. So I think some change
> needs to be made to submit.mc (then submit.cf created w/ m4). 
> 
> > 
> > On Red Hat, this is already done for you. By default, both sendmail and
> > Postfix are bound to loopback only.
> 
> That's how it was before version 8.12. I can send email to a local
> account w/o having sendmail running. I tested this on my RHL 7.1 box.
> 
> But version 8.12 is different because of the MSA.
> 
> If you're running RHL 9, try stopping sendmail and sending an email to a
> local account. I'll bet you can't, at least not w/ the default
> configuration.
> 
> Mike
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Ale mailing list
> Ale at ale.org
> http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale