July 2004 2:21 pm, John Thompson wrote:
> Many ISPs have taken to blocking port 25 connections from dynamic IP
> addesses as these are frequently spam bots. Instead, tell sendmail to
> use your ISP's smtp service as a "smart host" --
> define(`SMART_HOST',`smtp.your.provider') in sendmail.mc, generate a new
> sendmail.cf by running "make -C /etc/mail" and restart sendmail. Your
> outbound email will be routed through your ISP's smtp service for delivery.
Jorge Fábregas wrote:
> Why would you do that? Instead of specifying your ISP's MTA in your MUA? Any
> benefit?
Oh, there are a number of potential benefits. It depends on whether
you're running your computer like a typical Windows installation or not:
* Traditional e-mail clients on Unix use sendmail to send all their
e-mail anyway: SMTP is the role of a MTA, not the MUA. So there isn't
necessarily anywhere else to specify the ISP's MTA.
* If you've got a number of people behind an intermittent connection
(think dial-up), then when one connection is made, all outgoing
e-mail can be sent at once, without the users having to know when to
click "Send and Receive..."
* Likewise, you might have a number of MUAs you use yourself (one for
text mode, one for graphics, and you might have a number of shell
scripts that send e-mail). Again, this makes sure that all your
e-mails get sent at once.
* It's one central place to log all outgoing e-mails.
* Some combination of an MTA, fetchmail and procmail is significantly
more flexible than most MUAs at handling incoming e-mail, especially
for multiple accounts. If you've got an MTA set up for incoming
e-mail, it might as well handle outgoing e-mail as well.
I'm sure that other people can come up with more reasons. Personally, a
working MTA is something that I expect to find on a Unix system with
e-mail: it takes quite a bit of effort to think through the implications
of not having it there...
James.
--
E-mail address: james@ | NT is a one-legged cow, but even a one legged cow is
westexe.demon.co.uk | fast when it's got 160+ rockets strapped to it.
| -- Nick Manka
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| do is go around in circles. -- Darrell Fuhriman
