mail delivery on LAN

[Anthony E. Greene]

On 26-Dec-2004/07:39 -0500, Mark Weaver <mdw1982 at mdw1982.com> wrote:
>Shiraz Baig wrote:
>>I am trying to configure email delivery on my intranet LAN. I am running
>>Redhat 9.0. I have about 6 computers, hostnames are host11 upto host16.
>>When I send a mail from userA at host11  to userB at host16.  It does not get
>>delivered. It keeps sitting in the /var/spool/mqueue. The question is
>>what additional configuration is needed to deliver this mail?
>>
>>Presently, I am not connected to Internet. So, I have not installed DNS.
>>I am using /etc/hosts. All computers are pinging each other. I have
>>installed sendmail on each. I checked up with 
>>             # telnet localhost smtp
>>They all respond and show me that the mail daemon is running. 

What happens when you login to host11 and do this:

  telnet host12 smtp

>>Quest1: How to configure the system, that the mail is delivered to users
>>on the other hosts on my Intranet?
>
>First off, you don't need to be running Sendmail on the client machines
>in order for them to be able to get their mail messages.

But some SMTP client needs to be running to send outgoing messages about
system status, and to handle outgoing mail from locally logged in users
running a mail client like mutt, which does not have a built-in SMTP
capability. The default sendmail config does this without allowing
connections from remote machines (only listens for connections from
127.0.0.1).

>The only machine that needs Sendmail installed and running is the
>mailserver itself. The client machines pick up their mail via either pop3
>or imap.
[snipped good info on IMAP]

That only works if each user has a mail account on the mail server, a
setup which I recommend. There is no need to setup an SMTP server on
multiple machines.

>actually, even though your network isn't yet connected to the internet
>you can and should be running DNS for your intranet machines so mail can
>be accessed and made available properly to the client machines.

Agreed, although sendmail should work with properly maintained host files.
Another reason to run DNS is to reduce lookup times for your client
machines when you do get connected to the Internet. They will be able to
resolve addresses using your local DNS instead of sending a query up the
connection to your ISP.

Tony
-- 
Anthony E. Greene <mailto:Anthony%20E.%20Greene%20%3Ctony at greene-family.org%3E>
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