Fernando Blasco <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> Now my institution forbids us to use Linux computers as mail servers
> in order to prevent bulk mailing.
I suppose your insitution is worried that someone from the external
network might connect to a badly-configured sendmail running on your
Linux box, and use it to relay to other systems. This is a valid worry,
and their best bet at solving it would be to set up a firewall that
disallows incoming SMTP connections to any but a few trusted machines.
That way they don't have to care whether you run Linux or not.
> I'd like continue using mutt, but as far as I know, it uses sendmail,
> which needs to have open port 50.
Port 25.
> They suggest using Netscape or something similar, which operates
> without using sendmail.
Think about this for a moment. What does Netscape do when it wants to
deliver some mail? It opens a socket connection to the remote mail
server, on port 25. Now, what would your sendmail do when trying to
relay some mail from your machine? Why, it would open a socket
connection to the remote mail server, on port 25. In other words, your
insitution cannot tell whether you use Netscape or sendmail to send an
E-mail message from your machine. You can continue to use sendmail if
you want to.
If your institution is too stupid to set up a filter on incoming SMTP
connections, then you can easily fool them by not running sendmail as a
daemon. Instead, leave sendmail configured as it is, but do not start
it. Instead, install a root cron job like this:
# Try to deliver the sendmail queue every 15 minutes
5,20,35,50 * * * * /usr/lib/sendmail -q -oem
When you try to send mail, the copy of sendmail that is started up will
try to deliver it. If that delivery fails, this cron job will keep
trying to deliver it periodically. You'll have a working mail system
but without the dreaded listening-port-25 to worry about.
--
David DeSimone | "The doctrine of human equality reposes on this:
[EMAIL PROTECTED] | that there is no man really clever who has not
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