Sending mail direct from private network. Is this possible?

[leekb]

Dear all,

I have a Solaris 7 server with IP addr 10.5.0.1 living in the private domain. NAT occurs at the edge of the network so this server is able to access Internet via dynamic private to public IP address mapping.

There isn't any smart mail server that I can use. I would like to have the capability of sending emails from this server directly to any Internet email address, eg. abc@hotmail.com. Receiving emails is not required. Is it possible with this kind of setup? How do I configure sendmail to do this?

 

[jad]

does your machine have the ability to find out MX records? if it doesn't then you're better off getting a smart relay ... or use an open mail relay ... same as spammers

 

[leekb]

Jad, how do I find out whether the machine have ability to find MX records?

 

[leekb]

Dear all,

Can someone suggests an open mail relay that I can use? I will be using it for legitimate purpose... not for spamming.

thanks in advance

 

[jad]

can you not use your ISP? all ISP's have smtp servers ...

 

[tilli]

Hi leekb,

do NOT use an open relay!
If your border machine (the one which does NAT) uses dns to resolve hostnames in the internet it should also be able to lookup mx (mail exchange) records. Test this by doing a

# nslookup -querytype=mx hotmail.com

on that system and you should get a lot of answers. Just set up sendmail as a relay for your domain (not an open relay) and it should work. But talking about setting up sendmail normally does not contain a "just", you know what I mean?

Tilli

 

[leekb]

Dear experts,

I have configured sendmail successfully in Solaris 7 to relay emails from a private network to the Internet. It was as simple as a 3-step process:

1. Edit /etc/hosts to ensure domain is fully-qualified.
2. copy /etc/mail/main.cf to /etc/mail/sendmail.cf.
(Note: made no change in /etc/mail/sendmail.cf)
3. restart sendmail process.

It worked.

Now I wish to configure a Solaris 2.6 box in the same private domain as another relay. Surprisingly the content of /etc/main/main.cf in Solaris 2.6 is far different from Solaris 7. I would like to do the same that I had achieve on the Solaris 7 box. How do I go about doing it? Pls help.

thanks in advance.

 

[jad]

can you get the patches for solaris 2.6 that deal with sendmail? if you can get them and install them you should be able to do the same thing.

maybe

 

[leekb]

Does the patch make main.cf in 2.6 looks identical to Solaris 7 main.cf? I found this on sunfreeware.com a moment ago.

ftp://ftp.sunfreeware.com/pub/freeware/sparc/2.6/sendmail-8.9.1-sol26-sparc-local.gz

This sounds more like a complete software package than a patch. Will this help? Pls advise.

thanks.

 

[jad]

if you can get your version of sendmail on solaris 6to be the same or higher than the one solaris 7, then you can use the same sendmail.cf file. versions of sendmail are backward compatible ... although they do complain if it's a long way back

i wouldn't use the one from sunfreeware ... if you use a version provided by sun then it has all the sun extensions added into it. the one from sunfreeware doesn't do a lot of the stuff that the sun version does automatically ... if you're using networking for instance and mount /var/mail from another machine sun sendmail automatically registers the machine that owns /var/mail as the mailhost. the berkeley version doesn't.