RE: [Sheflug] MTAs

["David Morris" <nospam [at] allvac.co.uk>]

>
>  I'm playing with the idea of running qmail on my box...however I'm
> clueless...
>
>  Would it mean I could send out going mail, and still have a reply
> address of TheEnglishman@ecosse.net not baz [at] flux.localdomain (which
> wouldn't be too useful)?

QMail should work well. There's a control file (rcpthosts) which usually
sits in /var/qmail/control and has in it a list of all the valid domains
qmail will permit message for. From the man page:

<quote>
Allowed  RCPT  domains.   If  rcpthosts  is supplied,
qmail-smtpd  will  reject  any   envelope   recipient
address with a domain not listed in rcpthosts.
</quote>

We don't have a rcpthosts file, so we accept mail for any domain that gets
delivered to us.

We also employ multiple smtp delivery routes, with one to route mail via our
internet VPN to the US and the default route to route via our ISP smarthost.
This is controlled by domain.

>  Is there any point?

.in using qmail? Yes. It's easier to configure than sendmail (IMO), and
according to the blurb, is a hell of a lot faster. It's also intrinsically
more secure - it doesn't run as root for one. Having said that, I also have
a machine running sendmail, relaying mail picked up from an old mail account
which is retrieved using fetchmail and pushed into qmail for final delivery.

The maildir format used by qmail for message storage is also safer in the
event of a crash. Only one message potentially could get trashed, rather
than the whole file.

Although we're not a big site, I run qmail on a 200MHz Pentium with 64M RAM
for around 150 users using MS clients (predominantly Outlook98).

Anyway, isn't the reply-to address set by your client?

--
David Morris
IT Manager, ALLVAC Ltd, Sheffield, UK
work: david [at] allvac.co.uk       (ICQ: 53264726) http://www.allvac.co.uk
home: david [at] brassedoff.net     (ICQ: 52728733) http://www.davidm.demon.co.uk

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