Forum Email Fixed

[KD8TUT]

So, the site email seems to be working well again! Michael has us set up to use the gold standard of Linux mailers, "sendmail". Simple and fast, sendmail just works. So, the list of email functions that were previously affected are:

Um... err.... well there's some disagreement about that among admins.

Sendmail is not fast (but it's not slow).... it's not simple (but it's very powerful).... It just works (assuming you understand it's language)

The other competitors in open source SMTP servers are qmail and postfix. Qmail is fast and a pain in the ass. Postfix is slow (relatively) and easy to work with.

But sendmail can be secured against spam and viruses very well.... scanning for their presence on the fly (these features cost nothing). And since sendmail is *everywhere* almost all the outboard software you would use can talk to it.

So in a sense it is a "gold standard". It's been around since 1993. And more importantly... it can be configured into a pretzel if needed.

[ad4mg]

I've used sendmail to handle email from JNOS BBS systems to/from the internet back 'in the day'. I don't recall that it was particularly user friendly, but if you could get a JNOS BBS going, sendmail was a piece of cake!

I used to be one of the sysops for an emergency communication system for 12 hospitals. Voice and data... the latter via JNOS running on Slackware Linux. I still have all of the configuration files somewhere, but I doubt that I'd remember half of the stuff I used to know so well!

Um... err.... well there's some disagreement about that among admins.

Sendmail is not fast (but it's not slow).... it's not simple (but it's very powerful).... It just works (assuming you understand it's language)

The other competitors in open source SMTP servers are qmail and postfix. Qmail is fast and a pain in the ass. Postfix is slow (relatively) and easy to work with.

But sendmail can be secured against spam and viruses very well.... scanning for their presence on the fly (these features cost nothing). And since sendmail is *everywhere* almost all the outboard software you would use can talk to it.

So in a sense it is a "gold standard". It's been around since 1993. And more importantly... it can be configured into a pretzel if needed.

[KD8TUT]

I've used sendmail to handle email from JNOS BBS systems to/from the internet back 'in the day'. I don't recall that it was particularly user friendly, but if you could get a JNOS BBS going, sendmail was a piece of cake!

I used to be one of the sysops for an emergency communication system for 12 hospitals. Voice and data... the latter via JNOS running on Slackware Linux. I still have all of the configuration files somewhere, but I doubt that I'd remember half of the stuff I used to know so well!

Well the beauty in it for this situation is that Vbull expects to see sendmail. So in a sense it gets plug and play- at least in making the connection between the two.

The tricky bits that confuzzle new admins are all the little bits that go into being able to move mail out onto the internet successfully. Sendmail can be a bit arcane in that that department (and that's not taking into account all the RFC breaking changes in the "generally acceptable practices" now used on mail systems). There's the whole m4 language and sendmail.cf file which needs to be handled "just so". Then there's the milter interface for processing mail outside of sendmail (spam/virus checking) and the whole procmail delivery system.

But the big issue... are attacks against mail servers...

So when I config them I tie the whole works into fail2ban, DNSBL, and spamassassin. If you attack, port scan, spam, or have a history of spamming- poof... you cannot even connect to the server.

It requires a good bit of log parsing.

No idea why I wrote that much. I'm in the zone.

[KJ3N]

The other competitors in open source SMTP servers are qmail and postfix. Qmail is fast and a pain in the ass. Postfix is slow (relatively) and easy to work with.

Qmail is still around? I haven't used it since the mid 90s.

Briefly (well more like 3-4 years) had a free dyndns account and ran my own email server. For an idiot (barely understood Linux back then), I don't remember it being that hard to set up. Then again, that was 20 years ago and things have probably changed.

[KD8TUT]

Qmail is still around? I haven't used it since the mid 90s.

Briefly (well more like 3-4 years) had a free dyndns account and ran my own email server. For an idiot (barely understood Linux back then), I don't remember it being that hard to set up. Then again, that was 20 years ago and things have probably changed.

Qmail is still the second most common daemon on the internet.

Yea things have changed. You've got no chance of running a mail server on dynamic dns. You'll be insta-blocked by every mail service as soon as they see no reverse dns, so spf record, a consumer allocated IP, listing on a DNSBL, or actually detect that the dns is provided dynamically.