Teach me about: sendmail

[windependence]

Way to not go into a pissing match! You said something that was blatantly wrong, I corrected it. Period. Now until the OP tells us which MTA he chose, we can't really help him about configuring it.

My recommendation: sendmail. I'm running it on two mail servers, it's not nearly as difficult to configure as many people make it look like. As for being "insecure", I shall remind you that, to give just one example, OpenBSD uses it as its default MTA, and the OpenBSD people do not exactly have a reputation for including "insecure" software in the base system.

Against my better judgment and not intending to start a flame war because we are all on the same side I'm going to respond since I run *BSD on practically every production machine I have.

Two things. Just because an MTA is included in the default install does not mean there is anything special about it. With sendmail it goes more to tradition than anything else. Historically, sendmail has been included in Unix for decades and is expected to be there.

That being said, You may or may not know that OpenBSD is an operating system. Linux us not. It is a kernel. As such, before any port is added to the default install or as an option in OpenBSD it is audited by the OBSD team to be bullet proof. This is true of all OBSD software and this is why it is one of the most if not THE most secure OS on the planet with only two remote holes in over ten years. That does NOT mean it is any easier for a n00b or even a seasoned professional to configure.

We can certainly let him make his own choice. There is Exim and several others as an option, however I think you may agree Postfix has a great user community and is very well supported with tons of tutorials on the web. If he should choose Postfix, I'm ready to help.

-Tim

[joeydan1]

rpm? What Linux distribution are you using? Red Hat or CentOS?

yes, i used the RPM package for the software install, my os is Fedora 8,

[Kareeser]

My apologies for not replying sooner. I was turned off by the smart aleck who told me to google myself some answers (post 2, not 3.), and didn't check back until today.

Thanks for all the clarification, everybody. I ended up choosing exim4, which was fairly straightforward to set up.

One niggling problem, though:
In the debconf autoconfig, I was asked to provide an IP address for the server to listen on, so I faithfully plugged in my public static IP that refers to the server in question.

However, on running the startup script from /etc/init.d, exim4 complained that it couldn't use port 25, even though nothing was using it. (It's not the same error as "Port unavailable"... error message available on request)

I ended up conceeding and allowing exim4 to accept mail from anywhere (essentially, left the option blank)... and that worked, but why couldn't I tie exim4 to my public IP?

P.S.
Seems like postfix is the MTA of choice here - sorry I chose the other contender