John McKown writes: > On Mon, 23 Feb 2009, Adam Thornton wrote: > > > On Feb 23, 2009, at 8:13 PM, John McKown wrote: > > > > > > > > > Many thanks for any ideas. > > > > I wrote a very simple MTA based on Net::SMTP in perl to do this. It's > > straightforward. Net::SMTP makes it very, very easy, assuming you > > already speak Perl. However: > > > > Most Linux distros let you configure an MTA to use a remote host as > > its smarthost with a couple of clicks. I would not recommend sendmail > > for anything other than an emetic in this day and age, but certainly > > Debian's packaging of Exim lets you set up a mailserver pointing to a > > smarthost trivially, and I believe I remember that it's a single line > > in postfix as well. > > > > Adam > > > > Thanks for the pointers to Exim. > > I do know Perl, somewhat. I'll look at Net::SMTP as my needs are minimal. > > I'm not the sysadmin on this particular box (I support a vendor > application), so installing software is a bit difficult. I need to request > it from the sysadmin and then it needs to be approved by corporate > security (believe it or not).
The advantage to having an MTA running locally is that it handles all the corner cases of SMTP, queueing and logging so that you don't have to: what to do when the server is unavailable, what to do when the server is responding slowly, what to do when the server sends a temporary 4xx error, what to do when the server plays protocol games (more usual for externally facing servers, but still...), what to do when you suddenly want to send lots of mails at once. It's your local MTA's job to queue them for you locally, keep track of them, ensure they get sent out reliably eventually and let you know exactly whether they have been received successfully. If someone blames you for an email going missing and the remote folks can't/won't find what happened from their logs (maybe that doesn't happen these days but it sure used to...) then it's nice to be able to grep what happened out of your logs (exigrep is a useful utility if you use Exim) and tell them exactly when the email was sent across and exactly what their server said. Can you tell this is from the heart and from real experience? ;-) You don't need to have the MTA listening on an external interface (just localhost) so you don't have to worry about incoming mail and mail relay security. --Malcolm -- Malcolm Beattie System z SWG/STG, Europe IBM UK ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@vm.marist.edu with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
