Tom Horsley wrote:
I have tried to poke around in google for this before, but never found a satisfactory answer. Say I'm not running my own server, I don't have a domain name, i.e., a typical home computer. Can I configure sendmail to shuffle local mail around to local mailboxes, and take mail to external addresses sent by me and direct it to my ISP smtp server (which needs an SSL connection and user and password authorization). Or is there something that can act a lot like sendmail but is easier to configure to do this sort of thing?
The short answer is that you can do what you want with sendmail. I used to run my own mail server but it was too much of a pain. My ISP doesn't allow servers to be run by users and some mail servers will not accept mail sent from dynamic addresses. I now use fetchmail to pull mail down for all users (my family) from my ISP's servers. They access their mail directly from their mailboxes on my server which uses dovecot. All sent mail is sent to my mail server to be forwarded by sendmail to my ISP's server for delivery. I have sendmail configured to authenticate with the ISP server (also uses SSL and password).
I like to run sendmail on my server as it allows me to use spamassassin and MailScanner. Between these two programs I only see one or two spam emails a week (hundreds are screened out and discarded everyday). I used to screen out quite a few virus emails but my ISP has been doing pretty well getting rid of those. I put this together a few years ago when my ISP was really struggling with mail. Since it's working so well I've just left it inplace.
It sounds complicated but it's really pretty straight forward.
