<<< Date Index >>>     <<< Thread Index >>>

Re: selective smart host/sendmail choice



Hello David,

* On Fri, Jun 11, 2004 at 04:08:07AM -0400 David Yitzchak Cohen wrote:

> On Thu, Jun 10, 2004 at 03:02:13AM EDT, Spiro Trikaliotis wrote:
 
> > Possibly, you can use the same technique for sendmail, or you might want
> > to change to exim?
> 
> A good rule of thumb is that anything that an MTA can do, sendmail can
> do.

Yes, I already know that.

> However, another good rule of thumb is that anything you can do with
> another MTA after reading 2 pages of documentation, you'll have to
> read 200 before being able to do with sendmail.  It's one of the
> reasons why I love sendmail 8-)

This and the "great" history of sendmail vulnerabilities are the reasons
why I don't like sendmail.


> If I were going to do that, my approach would probably be to define
> two mailers, the smtp mailer, and the relay-to-smarthost mailer.  I'd
> then tell sendmail to try smtp first for any given message, and
> failing that (4xx error code) to fallback to the smarthost relay.
> ("Can your exim do THAT?" ... hehe. . .)

This question came up more than once. I don't know if exim can handle
it. In fact, I don't mind. IMHO, this precedure does not make sense.
Especially as more and more, mail addresses which have a domain, but are
sent in from another host, are take as one big hint for SPAM, this is
not a good approach. I don't like my mails to be silently discarded just
because I have not send them via the official mailer.

So, you see, the 4xx error code is my smallest problem.

Regards,
   Spiro.

-- 
Spiro R. Trikaliotis
http://www.trikaliotis.net/
http://www.viceteam.org/