a new sendmail question

[Kevin J. Cummings]

Tom Horsley wrote:
> I have tried to poke around in google for this before,
> but never found a satisfactory answer.
> 
> Say I'm not running my own server, I don't have a domain name,
> i.e., a typical home computer.

I got mine from DynDNS.  It is free for home use, allows me to
"register" my IP address from my ISP (DynDNS publishes the MX records
for me), and I can run sendmail locally to both accept incoming emals
and send outgoing emails.

> Can I configure sendmail to shuffle local mail around to
> local mailboxes, and take mail to external addresses
> sent by me and direct it to my ISP smtp server (which
> needs an SSL connection and user and password
> authorization).

By default, the sendmail configuration listens to only the localhost
interface for email.  You have to modify your /etc/mail/sendmail.mc file
to enable it to listen on your ISP's interface in order to be able to
receive email from the Internet.  In order to be able to SEND email out
to the Internet, it should just work out of the box if you have a DNS
server set up properly.  The one thing that might be a problem (it is
for me) is that some ISPs block outgoing SMTP connections, and required
that you send all outgoing emails through their SMTP servers.  This can
be accomplished by adding a SMART_HOST directive to your
/etc/mail/sendmail.mc file.

Read your /etc/mail/sendmail.mc file.  It will show you how to edit it
and rebuild it if you make any changes.  It should be pretty painless
for these simple changes.  Make sure you have the sendmail-cf rpm installed.

> Or is there something that can act a lot like sendmail
> but is easier to configure to do this sort of thing?

There are lots of things that act like sendmail.  Postfix, QMail, Exim,
and I'm sure there are more (Google for "Mail Transport Agent").  Many
different people will tell you that the one they use is the best.
Decide for yourself.  I use sendmail because I helped maintain my
company's email configuration using sendmail 15 years ago, and I've used
sendmail on my Linux systems ever since.

-- 
Kevin J. Cummings
kjchome at rcn.com
cummings at kjchome.homeip.net
cummings at kjc386.framingham.ma.us
Registered Linux User #1232 (http://counter.li.org)