a new sendmail question

[John Summerfield]

Gerry Doris wrote:
> 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 

I flatly refuse such accounts.

> mail sent from dynamic addresses.  I now use fetchmail to pull mail down 

So configure your server to relay via your ISP's mail server, Probably 
you should, for other reasons. However, I also avoid dynamic IP and I've 
not had any problems sending mail direct to the recipeint's MX.

> 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've used fetchmail extensively (possibly you will even find my name in 
the documentation), and it's good at what it does.

> 
> 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 

How much good mail do you discard?


> 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.

I do not discard email in my mail systems. I refuse to accept it, or I 
filter suspected spam into users' spam folder. I have seen false 
positives - e*trade is stupid.

I also have a rough filter that drops email that may contain suspect 
attachments into users' Windwoes folders.

> 


-- 

Cheers
John

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