E-mail, graphical and otherwise

[Ernest H. Rice]

Folks:
First, kudos on a great UNIX!
Having wokred with many UNiXs over they years I must admit I like FreeBSD the 
best!

Coming from the old school of System V, I am accustomed to using command line 
email for many things. Of course, in this day and age I have moved on to 
GUIs, and the mailers they provide. They surely are far more practical than 
the original /bin/mail and mailx I worked with in the old days.

But things aren't always well suited for GUI email. When you are scripting 
something, and want to generate an email message, one still needs a command 
line mailer. I find myself in this situation often.

For quite some time I have been able to configure sendmail to use a smart host 
for relaying of my email to the outside world. I would ljust point sendmail 
at my ISP's mail system, and away my email woudl go to its intended 
recipient.

As spammers have appeared, my ISp has tightened the security on the system 
they allow to relay through them. They now require authentication.

With the graphical mailers, this is not a problem. I select Authenticated SMTP 
for outgoing and POP for incoming and everything works well.

The command line is another story. When I configure sendmail to do the smart 
host, and I generate email from the command line there is no authentication 
being performed, AND to make matters worse, my ISP's machine insists on being 
able to perform a reverse lookup of my IP address to let me relay. Like most 
people, I have broadband at the home-office, and with that I have a dynamic 
IP. The dynamic IP makes the reverse lookup fail. That coupled with the lack 
of authentication has been causing me great pain for some time now.

I have tried anubis, but that does not work for me sa I still fail on the 
reverse lookup. I have talked with various people and none have been able to 
recommend an elegant solution.

So I approach the 'gurus'...

What I am searching for is a comand line environment for email, which will 
offer me the same options - and hopefully the same ease of configuration - as 
the graphical mailers. A command line solution which will not be caught up in 
the reverse lookup problem, and also be able to perform the necessary 
authentication. Masquerading would also be nice, since I want to have all my 
email 'appear' as if it originated from my domain, which is hosted by my ISP 
(as opposed to being obvious that it originated from my basement).

For your perusal I am including the output from a sendmail session which shows 
the rejection of my email through my ISP. 

I have worked on this problem for months now, and am at the end of my rope 
(otherwise I would not bother you folks with this). If I have this problem, I 
am sure others do also.

PLEASE, think about this and let me know if you have any ideas.

Thanks in advance...

Ernie Rice

220-occp4.ocservers.net ESMTP Exim 3.36 #1 Sat, 10 May 2003 16:55:43 -0700
220-We do not authorize the use of this system to transport unsolicited,
220 and/or bulk e-mail.
>>> EHLO fred.ehr3.net
250-occp4.ocservers.net Hello pool-151-198-132-161.mad.east.verizon.net 
[151.198.132.161]
250-SIZE
250-PIPELINING
250-AUTH PLAIN LOGIN
250-STARTTLS
250 HELP
>>> MAIL From:<ehr3 at fred.ehr3.net> SIZE=5
250 reject all recipients: 3 times bad sender <ehr3 at fred.ehr3.net>
>>> RCPT To:<ehr3 at ehr3.com>
>>> DATA
550 cannot route to sender address <ehr3 at fred.ehr3.net>
503 Valid RCPT TO <recipient> must precede DATA
>>> RSET
250 Reset OK
ehr3... Connecting to [127.0.0.1] via relay...
ehr3... Deferred: Connection refused by [127.0.0.1]
Closing connection to mail.ehr3.com.
>>> QUIT
221 occp4.ocservers.net closing connection