Email getting and sending

Gerry Doris gdoris at rogers.com
Mon Jul 26 05:01:26 UTC 2004


On Sun, 2004-07-25 at 19:23, James Wilkinson wrote:
> July 2004 2:21 pm, John Thompson wrote:
> > Many ISPs have taken to blocking port 25 connections from dynamic IP
> > addesses as these are frequently spam bots.  Instead, tell sendmail to
> > use your ISP's smtp service as a "smart host" --
> > define(`SMART_HOST',`smtp.your.provider') in sendmail.mc, generate a new
> > sendmail.cf by running "make -C /etc/mail" and restart sendmail.  Your
> > outbound email will be routed through your ISP's smtp service for delivery.
> 
> Jorge Fábregas wrote:
> > Why would you do that? Instead of specifying your ISP's MTA in your MUA? Any 
> > benefit?
> 
> Oh, there are a number of potential benefits. It depends on whether
> you're running your computer like a typical Windows installation or not:
> 
>  * Traditional e-mail clients on Unix use sendmail to send all their
>    e-mail anyway: SMTP is the role of a MTA, not the MUA. So there isn't
>    necessarily anywhere else to specify the ISP's MTA.
> 
>  * If you've got a number of people behind an intermittent connection
>    (think dial-up), then when one connection is made, all outgoing
>    e-mail can be sent at once, without the users having to know when to
>    click "Send and Receive..."
> 
>  * Likewise, you might have a number of MUAs you use yourself (one for
>    text mode, one for graphics, and you might have a number of shell
>    scripts that send e-mail). Again, this makes sure that all your
>    e-mails get sent at once.
> 
>  * It's one central place to log all outgoing e-mails.
> 
>  * Some combination of an MTA, fetchmail and procmail is significantly
>    more flexible than most MUAs at handling incoming e-mail, especially
>    for multiple accounts. If you've got an MTA set up for incoming
>    e-mail, it might as well handle outgoing e-mail as well.
> 
> I'm sure that other people can come up with more reasons. Personally, a
> working MTA is something that I expect to find on a Unix system with
> e-mail: it takes quite a bit of effort to think through the implications
> of not having it there...
> 
> James.

Besides the above points I use a Fedora box running sendmail,
MailScanner, SpamAssassin, and three virus scanners (F-Prot, Trend, and
ClamAV).  This system scans all email that is sent or received from all
my other boxes (win98SE, XP, and linux).

Using some other utilities (mailwatch and mailscanner-mrtg) I can view
mail stats, quarantined messages, etc for all users.

The end result is that we rarely see a spam message, never have had a
virus, and I always know exactly what is going on.

-- 
Gerry Doris <gdoris at rogers.com>





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