Hot to configure simple mail forwarder?

Maxim Khitrov mkhitrov at gmail.com
Mon May 21 17:52:35 UTC 2007


On 5/21/07, Per olof Ljungmark <peo at intersonic.se> wrote:
> Maxim Khitrov wrote:
> > Hi everyone,
> >
> > I have what I hope is a rather simple question. I'm not very familiar
> > with this area of system administration, so hopefully someone here can
> > point me in the right direction. I just got myself a FreeBSD VPS to
> > host a few of my websites. I need the processes on the server (PHP,
> > for example) to be able to send e-mail via /usr/sbin/sendmail. The
> > thing is that I don't actually want to run a mail server. My vps is
> > severely limited on disk space, and any mail I get I'll forward to my
> > gmail account anyway. I can obviously configure sendmail or postfix to
> > do this for me, but this seems a bit excessive for what I'm trying to
> > do. The mail load will be very light, and I'd prefer to conserve disk
> > space. Is there a port, perhaps, that will simply forward all mail
> > transmitted to /usr/sbin/sendmail to the destination SMTP server? The
> > only other thing it has to be able to do is use the aliases file to
> > determine the real e-mail of root, for example.
> >
> > Like I said, I'm not too familiar with setting up mail servers, so if
> > this makes no sense to you please suggest an alternative. Just to
> > recap, I don't need local mail storage and I don't need the server to
> > accept mail from anything other than the local processes running on
> > the server. Just need it to read the destination e-mail address (or
> > get it via aliases), connect to the MX server for that domain, and
> > transmit the message. If there isn't any simple daemon that will do
> > this, can you recommend either how to configure sendmail or something
> > like postfix to do this? The idea is to minimize resource usage (disk
> > space, memory, cpu time).
>
> Sounds to me you just have to enter the proper aliases (in
> /etc/mail/aliases), run "newaliases", and you're done, i.e. point
> everything to your own e-mail address?
>

Well I need sendmail running for that correct? Right now I've got it
disabled with sendmail_enable="NONE" in my rc.conf. I was hoping to
use something a bit less resource intensive, and with a better
security history. I am not really at all familiar with sendmail. I
tried figuring out how to configure and tune it properly in the past,
and realized that I have neither the time or patience for that task. I
know that it will probably work the way it comes by default with
FreeBSD, but I really don't like running daemons that I don't
understand or don't know how to configure and monitor.

If this is the most efficient solution to my problem, then I guess
I'll head over to the handbook and try to figure sendmail out. If you
have other suggestions, by all means, let me know. Otherwise, are
there at least parts of sendmail that I can disable?

P.S. Sorry for the typo in the title.

- Max


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