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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