Mail Madness

My next project while we’re offline is to get out mail system properly configured. Like everything else around here, we need the industrial strength version: Because Lisa travels she needs to check (and answer) her mail from the road, so we need SMTP-AUTH. And we run multiple domains.

I’ve looked, and I haven’t found an MTA except sendmail that will do both. And sendmail is a !@#$%^& to deal with. Cool mascot though.

I’ve been using Linuxconf’s vpop setup and it’s worked pretty well. Unfortunately, Linuxconf doesn’t support SMTP-Auth. The sendmail.cfs it generates seem support gssapi SMTP-Auth, which is Kerberos, but not plain old ‘plain’.

However, once I decided to fight my way through the jungle, getting SMTP-Auth working seems too easy to be true: I activated Cyrus-SASL (installed by default), did whatever I needed (sorry, forgot to write it down) to give myself a password ,went into sendmail.mc, told it it grokked ‘plain’ (just uncommented the appropriate entry) authentication, rebuilt sendmail.cf with m4, and presto it worked.

Of course this all after spending hours reading the docs for both Cyrus-SASL and Sendmail. The docs just aren’t that helpful, and the new Sendmail book hadn’t arrived from Amazon. But the sample file is pretty well documented, and my blind edit worked.

So Bunter is checking passwords before relaying. Now hopefully Lisa can get her mail without Earthlink calling us an open relay. (We weren’t).

Stay tuned for the next thrilling chapter in the saga.

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