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1. Tasks

When configuring a Linux computer running Sendmail you must/can do the following things

Configure basic information

You must minimally specify the intended purpose of your computer, mail wise: Is it a workstation or the mail server ? What is the domain used for email ? ...

Configure special (domain) routing

You can setup exception in the routing. If you know a short cut to a specific site or domain, you can tell Sendmail here. This is especially needed to connect uucp sites to the Internet.

Configure complex (user) routing

This let you do mail routing based on the the user and domain destination. This way it is possible to handle mail to a domain one way and do some exception for few user of this domain. This feature is not a replacement for normal user alias although it performs at first sight the same thing.

Masquerading rules

You can define filters replacing the sender/domain of a mail by another sender and or domain. This is handy for some mail broken gateway which send email with a bogus return address. If your Linus server is in the path, you can fix it!

Mail to fax gateway

This allows your server to route email message to your fax engine. It supports various access control rules. Mail to fax offers the universal protocol for faxing from a computer. Easy to use and usable by any user/operating system.

Virtual email domain

A virtual email domain lets you set one independent user list per domain, on the same server. Further each virtual email domain may have its own administrator(s).

This ability ease the management of user accounts since each domain has its own list. Further, virtual email domain may be moved from server to server very easily to balance the load.

A must for large organization and ISPs...

Setting user alias

Some users may want to receive their email under different names, or you want to set a "pseudo" user and direct the mail of this user to a real user. Good examples are postmaster, info and support.

Virtual domain user aliases

Virtual domain have their own user aliases list.

Generate /etc/sendmail.cf

Sendmail is configured using the file /etc/sendmail.cf. This file contains pretty complex configuration commands looking much more like a programming language than a configuration file. For this reason, this file is not edit by Linuxconf, but generated from scratch all the time.

When using this menu option, Linuxconf prompts you to make sure you really want to generated this file.

If you do various modification in the sendmail configuration using Linuxconf, it will suggest you to generate a new sendmail.cf to make those config changes active.

See the comments at the beginning of /etc/sendmail.cf to see how it is built and how manual modifications may be done (expert only!).

Setting rejected senders

This dialog lets you enter the email addresses, domains and IP numbers from which you never want to receive email.

Setting relay for by IP

You can enter the hosts and networks for which you accept to relay mail. You generally enter here your own IP networks where there are some other sendmail servers and user workstations.

Setting relay for by Name

Same as above, except that you enter hosts and domains here, not IP numbers.

Setting relay to hosts

You enter the names, IP numbers, networks, and domains to which you accept to relay.


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