How to configure simple mail forwarder?

[Maxim Khitrov]

On 5/21/07, Jerry McAllister <jerrymc at msu.edu> wrote:
> On Mon, May 21, 2007 at 01:52:34PM -0400, Maxim Khitrov wrote:
>
> > 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?
>
> There is nothing wrong with using sendmail.
> If you want to 'receive' email at the address and forward it to
> some other address, then there is nothing you have to do to configure it.
> Just leave it at its defaults.    Then put the aliases in as indicated.
>
> If you want to be able to send out Email - say from processes, but
> receive no email, not even to forward, then set it to 'no' in rc.conf.
>
> ////jerry

Fair enough, I'll give that a try. Just for my own info, when I set
sendmail_enable to NO and start it up I get sendmail_submit and
sendmail_clientmqueue starting. Am I correct in assuming that
clientmqueue is what accepts the messages from the processes on the
system (places them in /var/spool/mqueue), and submit is what actually
delivers them to other servers?

Thanks for your help guys!