Sendmail help sought

[Mikkel]

On 02/16/2010 08:21 AM, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> Tim wrote:
> 
>> I'm not talking about IP addresses, I mean email addresses.  Presume
>> that I am tim at localhost on my machine, and I masquerade my mail to
>> change localhost to the domain name of my ISP (e.g. example.com), and I
>> (now) send out my mail as tim at example.com, to save me from configuring
>> my mail clients.  But, *I* shouldn't do that, because I am not user
>> "tim" on my ISP, some other person has that ISP mail account.
> 
But you can configure it so that tim at localhost gets mapped to
gayleard at eircom.net bu your mail server. It is also possible to map
all users except for specific ones to all go out as
gayleard at eircom.net. Normally root does not get changed. I don't
remember if postmaster does.

> That is exactly my problem.
> I am "tim" on my own machines, but "gayleard at eircom.net" to my ISP.
> 
>> Masquerading has to be done with due care, as with just about all
>> aspects of running a mail server attached to the public internet.
> 
> I must admit I am still not clear about the purpose of masquerading.
> What is a concrete situation where it might make sense?
> 
You have a local network network that sends all outside mail through
one mail server. The internal mail address may be something like
lab1.foo.net, but mail headed for the Internet must be from foo.net
or even bar.net in order for return messages to reach the proper
mail server.

For a home network, you may want different local accounts to go out
through different ISP's mail servers.

The need for running a masquerading mail server on a home system has
become rare with the use of always on broadband connections. Also.
mail clients like Thunderbird send the outgoing messages directly to
the proper mail server without any name re-writing being necessary.
For home networks, there is seldom a need for the local mail server
to connect ot the Internet at all.

> Incidentally, I don't think I am running a mail SERVER
> as I understand that term.
> I collect all my email from external mail servers with fetchmail .
> 
> 
By default, Fedora runs Sendmail to handle locally generated mail
from things like cron jobs. Depending how you have Fetchmail set up,
it may also handle delivering the messages that Fetchmail gets.
Fetchmail can be configured to rewrite fetched mail to a local mail
address.

One final note - for most home networks, Sendmail is overkill - you
don't need most of the features. You may want to look into one of
the lighter alternatives.

Mikkel
-- 

  Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons,
for thou art crunchy and taste good with Ketchup!

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