Suggestion For Handbook Addition Regarding sendmail

[Drew Tomlinson]

I hope this is the right list.  If not, please nudge me appropriately.  :)

I've been using FreeBSD since 4.0 but never learned anything about 
Sendmail.  It seemed very complicated and therefore I chose Postfix for 
my little home servers.  I have never looked back.

However I recently installed FreeBSD at work for an application that was 
not supported on Solaris.  The only mail function this machine requires 
is the ability to send outbound mail from local accounts, i.e. "root".  
Thus installing postfix seemed overkill.  Since the default install of 
sendmail is already limited to outbound only, I just needed to configure 
sendmail send via an outbound relay.

For such a seemingly common scenario, I turned to the Handbook.  I was a 
little disappointed that section 29.3 did not cover this and found the 
information in /usr/src/contrib/sendmail/cf/README confusing.  I knew I 
was looking for some *.mc file to edit somehow and then generate the 
sendmail.cf some way.  I suppose that for most *nix admins, this is 
considered common knowledge.  However for a newbie, I was confused.  My 
"Google-fu" turned up lots of links that suggested sendmail be 
configured to relay via one's ISP relay but no specific instructions on 
how to achieve this.  Finally, I found this FAQ 
(http://www.technoids.org/freebsdsendmailfaqs.html) to be very helpful 
for learning how to make a sendmail.cf file the FreeBSD way.  If it does 
break any copyright laws, including this info in the Handbook would help 
other newbies.

Thanks,

Drew

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