Developer Forum

apologize for the cross post, but I'm not sure where to look here. Also
have to say that I'm a rank newbie at this, and am currently having a
"duhh.." day...<sigh>

I've got mutt working fine. It gets mail down, and at one point I thought
it was also sending mail out as well. Not sure, though. You see, I looked
right at the part in the .muttrc that talked about Sendmail, left it at
default, and completely shined Sendmail itself.. Most GUI email clients
have their own smtp capability, and I have never had to do anything on that
account.

At some point, it occured to me that I should have Sendmail working. I'm
running Slackware 10.0 (you'd think I should already know this stuff, but
I'm a Slack newbie as well...); so, figuring there should be at least some
default configuration for Sendmail, I launched it.

Mail that I thought had been already sent started pouring into Mutt! Argghh!

Looking at the headers, it was obvious that Sendmail, once launched, had set
about sending all that stuff out, and was having difficulty with
configuration. So I did the configuration thing, using Slackware's *.mc
file as the template. Here are the changes:

----------------------------------------------------------------
[root@ansible /usr/share/sendmail/cf/cf]# diff sendmail-slackware.mc
sendmail-new.mc
13c13
< VERSIONID(default setup for Slackware Linux')dnl
---
19c19
< dnl define(SMART_HOST',mailserver.example.com')
---
36c36
< dnl FEATURE(accept_unresolvable_domains')dnl
---
39c39
< LOCAL_DOMAIN(localhost.localdomain')dnl
---
----------------------------------------------------------------

So then I did `m4 sendmail-new.mc > sendmail-new.cf`. Cursor left briefly
and returned and there was the new .cf file. Moved that over to /etc/mail
as sendmail.cf, and restarted Sendmail.

Then I restarted Mutt and tried sending a test email to myself. Didn't work:

I got: "Program mode requires special privileges, eg., root or
TrustedUser." At the bottom: Output of the delivery process "Error sending
message, child exited 78 ()."

Hmmm... well, there is a /etc/mail/trusted-users. `file` says its a C++
file, and nowhere could I find the format for putting either mutt or myself
in there. So I edited the sendmail.cf file directly and added to the
Trusted Users section thus:

---------------------------------------------
#####################
# Trusted users #
#####################

# this is equivalent to setting class "t"
Ft/etc/mail/trusted-users
Troot
Tdaemon
Tuucp
Tmutt
Twtallman
--------------------------------------------

The last two entries were what was added.

Saved the file. Relaunched Sendmail. Relaunched Mutt.

Mutt gave the same response.

Incidentally, I grepped for smtp.olypen.com in the mc file and found it
where it is listed above. Grepping the same in the cf file returned
nothing! Something must be wrong here, as the cf file is just the mc file
reformatted and with all the macros included, or is that not the case?
Nevertheless, the complaint wasn't that it couldn't find the ISP server...

I probably also have to check file permissions, but which ones and what
should they be?

For those who read this far and have some idea of what I've done and should
now do: What am I missing? What have I done wrong? Where do I need to go
from here?

Thanks all!

Bill Tallman
--
Email is wtallman at olypen dot com

You don't need a full-featured MTA to send mail to your ISP's (or anyone
else's) full-featured MTA.

MTAs are *very* complex applications that do things you don't need done.

A LOT of things you don't need to do unless you are running a mailserver
for an ISP or a major LAN, etc.

A "naive" smtp client (that just sends your mail to your ISP's MTA) can be
as tiny as a 2K shell script, but most of us use a compiled program like
ssmtp, which has a 5 line configuration file and is only 20K. There are
others too. (Sometimes called "sendmail emulations")

Install ssmtp and you will be up and running in 5 minutes and never need
to touch the program again. Any number of people that frequent
comp.mail.misc (and probably comp.mail.sendmail) can walk you through it.

Then you just point your Mutt at it.

AC


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