[ale] Bellsouth Turning SMTP authentication on on their mail server

[Mike Murphy]

I use TLS too, to authenticate remote connections to my mail server at 
home (mostly from my laptop when I'm on the road). However, the problem 
presented by Bellsouth here is different:

They are requiring all of their clients to authenticate to send mail, 
starting Jul 13 (next Tuesday). If I were running a regular client, say 
thunderbird from home, and using their mail server, I'd have to 
configure it to pass my username and password when it sends mail.

The challenge here is configuring sendmail to do the same thing, when it 
talks to bellsouth's mail server. To recap, I already have:

"DS[mail.bellsouth.net]" in my sendmail.cf. This tells it to relay all 
mail through bellsouth's mail server (and the brackets tell it to use 
that server's A name from dns, not its MX addresses).

Now, in addition, I have to add (from 
http://www.sendmail.org/~ca/email/sm-812.html#812AUTH):
O DefaultAuthInfo=/etc/mail/default-auth-info

This tells sendmail (at least sendmail 8.12 and newer), to look in 
/etc/mail/default-auth-info for authorization info. That file has this 
in it:
AuthInfo:mail.bellsouth.net "U:[my username]" "P:[my password]"

In theory that should make sendmail now authenticate before it tries to 
relay mail (just like any client would).

Now that I know how to do this in sendmail.cf, I need to figure out how 
to do it using a rule in sendmail.mc (since I'd prefer to not directly 
edit sendmail.cf if I can avoid it). Or, I guess I could finally get off 
my duff and learn exim or something.

Unfortunately, mail.bellsouth.net still isn't offering AUTH, so I can't 
really test this to see if it works correctly. I guess I'll have to do 
so after they turn it on on the 13th.

Mike


james at sumners.ath.cx wrote:
> I just configured my Exim server to do it:
> http://ug.dyndns.org/~jsumners/comments.php?article=157
> 
> But, of course, if you have relaying denied and you are the only one
> that uses it then who cares?
> 
> On Fri, Jul 09, 2004 at 10:22:15AM -0400, Mike Murphy wrote:
> 
>>I got this from Bellsouth today. It seems they will soon be requiring 
>>SMTP clients to authenticate before sending mail. Now, if I can just 
>>remember how to configure sendmail to do that...
>>
>>Mike
> 
> 

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Mike Murphy
781 Inman Mews Drive Atlanta GA 30307
Landline: 404-653-1070
Mobile: 404-545-6234
Email: mike at tyderia.net
AIM: mmichael453
JDAM: 33:45:14.0584N  84:21:43.038W
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