On Sun, 2004-07-25 at 19:23, James Wilkinson wrote: > 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. Besides the above points I use a Fedora box running sendmail, MailScanner, SpamAssassin, and three virus scanners (F-Prot, Trend, and ClamAV). This system scans all email that is sent or received from all my other boxes (win98SE, XP, and linux). Using some other utilities (mailwatch and mailscanner-mrtg) I can view mail stats, quarantined messages, etc for all users. The end result is that we rarely see a spam message, never have had a virus, and I always know exactly what is going on. -- Gerry Doris <gdoris@xxxxxxxxxx>
