E-mail, graphical and otherwise

[William Palfreman]

On Sat, 10 May 2003, Ernest H. Rice wrote:

> 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
> just point sendmail at my ISP's mail system, and away my email would
> go to its intended recipient.

I don't do this.  I bypass my ISPs mail system entirely, by letting
sendmail on my workstation get on with its job, and work out where to
send the email to via the MX record.  If you look through my message
headers you'll see there are no hops between my cable modem and either
mx1.freebsd.org or mail.ehr3.com, depending on which recipient you are.
That's because I don't have a smarthost set - no need to.  There was
only one other bit of configuration to do, not working by default.

To be able to actually send to FreeBSD mailing lists, I had to add
Djntli.net to my sendmail.cf file - for some reason, mx1.freebsd.org
requires senders to have an domain with an MX record to post, or else it
450s them - HELO command rejected.  Anyone's domain name will do though,
as long as you don't want to ever receive email from them with usernames
that aren't local.  I know I don't want to ever receive mail from
ntli.net, so that should be just fine.

Personally, I don't see how this hold back spammers much, but it does
stop users of newly set up FreeBSD workstations from posting to this
mailing list, although they can mail the rest of the Internet fine.
Must be good training for them, having to work out the Dj directive in
sendmail.cf before they can start asking questions.  Forces
self-reliance.

Bill.

-- 
W. Palfreman. 			I'm looking for a job. Read my CV at:
Tel: 0771 355 0354		www.palfreman.com/william/cv-wfp2.html