Sending Mail

I originally used sendmail, modifying it according to the instructions RedHat gives you. This works for most things, but I was unable to send email to other users at my isp. Since I administer a mailing list (for The Boston Wort Processors) which lives on my isp, and several pretty good friends use the same isp, some of them because of my recommendation, this is a nuisance. AOL also uses some different method from most places for deciding whether you should be able to send their users email, and they sometimes didn't work.

If you insist on trying to do this, I believe that if you got all of SMART_HOST, genericstable, and MASQUERADE_ENVELOPE to work at once, these problems would be solved. However, what I found was that when they didn't work, there didn't seem to be anyone who was able to look at what I was doing and say "Here's where your problem is", even though several of the people I asked had put a lot more time into debugging email than I ever want to.

The "Bat Book" (Sendmail, by Bryan Costales with Eric Allman, O'Reilly and Associates) does give helpful ideas about how to go about debugging things, but I really spent longer than I wanted to, and succeeded only in breaking things, never in fixing the problem with sending mail to the other users on my isp.

I got tired of this game, so the next thing I tried was installing qmail. This worked fine, but was a nuisance to do again when I upgraded my OS.

So the last time I upgraded my OS, I tried the postfix rpm that came with Mandrake 6.0. It worked fine out of the box, with only editing one config file that needs to know the obvious things, like where your mailbox is.

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Last modified: 2002-06-29 11:12, 2007
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