a new sendmail question

[Gerry Doris]

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

The short answer is that you can do what you want with sendmail.  I used 
to run my own mail server but it was too much of a pain.  My ISP doesn't 
allow servers to be run by users and some mail servers will not accept 
mail sent from dynamic addresses.  I now use fetchmail to pull mail down 
for all users (my family) from my ISP's servers.  They access their mail 
directly from their mailboxes on my server which uses dovecot.  All sent 
mail is sent to my mail server to be forwarded by sendmail to my ISP's 
server for delivery.  I have sendmail configured to authenticate with 
the ISP server (also uses SSL and password).

I like to run sendmail on my server as it allows me to use spamassassin 
and MailScanner.  Between these two programs I only see one or two spam 
emails a week (hundreds are screened out and discarded everyday).  I 
used to screen out quite a few virus emails but my ISP has been doing 
pretty well getting rid of those.  I put this together a few years ago 
when my ISP was really struggling with mail.  Since it's working so well 
I've just left it inplace.

It sounds complicated but it's really pretty straight forward.