Changing the version broadcasted by Sendmail

[Reuben D. Budiardja]

Hello,
I am having some problem with my campus network administrator / ISP 
complaining that I am running vulnerable versions of sendmail on our older 
machines (redhat 7.3 and 9), since the version broadcasted by sendmail is < 
8.12.10, which according to sendmail website fixed a security vulnerability.

I checked RHN errata and I know that Redhat already backported the security 
fix for that problem before the EOL of RH 9 and 7.3, so my sendmail versions 
are not vulnerable. It's just Redhat did not change their sendmail version 
from 8.11.x to 8.12.x. 

I explained this to them and they didn't believe it. They can't even believe 
that Redhat as a vendor would fix any vulnerability found in sendmail, and 
they insist that they go by what's in Sendmail website and that I have to 
upgrade my sendmail. Well I don't want to do that since I know I am not 
vulnerable. Even fedoralegacy does not have any more fixes for Sendmail.

So my question, is there any way that I can change the version broadcasted by 
sendmail, so that for example when I do 'telnet machine 25' I get the 
'required' version (ie. 8.12.11 or whatever) ? I assume something like that 
is what the network admin people here do to check the version of sendmail 
that I'm running.

Any suggestion ? Anyone's been in similar situation before ? what do you do in 
that case ? Any respond will be appreciated.

Thanks.
RDB