Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Sat, 7 Sep 2002 14:35:00 -0700 (PDT)
From:      Donald Burr of Borg <dburr@borg-cube.com>
To:        FreeBSD Questions <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org>
Subject:   SMTP AUTH support in sendmail?
Message-ID:  <20020907142455.P72460-100000@borg-cube.com>

next in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Hi folks,

Recently I had a bit of a dilemma.  I went away for vacation, but of
course I wanted to keep in touch with my e-mail, so I brought my laptop
along.  Reading mail was no problem -- I have POP3 and IMAP daemons
running.  But SENDING mail on the other hand... I'd rather use my SMTP
server, rather than my dialup ISP's, for various reasons.  And, of course,
sendmail is configured by default to NOT allow relaying.  Now, to get it
to work, I could add the domain of my ISP's dialup pool to
/etc/mail/relay-domains (e.g. pool.dialup.isp.com) but that means that
every yokel who has an account at my ISP will now be able to relay through
my server.  This is BAD.  So my workaround was to insert just the IP
address of my connection in the relay-domains file.  This of course was a
real pain, because it required me to ssh in and edit the file each time my
IP changed (i.e. each time I lost my dialup connection, which was quite
often, in my case... bad phone lines where I was staying at).

Now, at our office, we use qmail.  Thanks to a nice little patch called
"qmail-smtpd-auth", the qmail SMTP daemon now supports a nice little
command called "AUTH" which allows you to authenticate to the SMTP server
with a username/password.  If you DON'T authenticate, then you CAN'T
relay.  If you DO authenticate, however, you can basically do whatever the
heck you want.  This has worked well for our company, as we have a lot of
clients who have insecure accounts such as cable modem, DHCP DSL, and
(blech) AOL.  They can authenticate to our mail server to send out their
(legitimate) e-mail, while Joe Random Spammer is blocked at the gate.

So here's my question: Is it possible to add some sort of SMTP AUTH (or
other similar authentication support) in sendmail, or must I upgrade to
qmail for this to work?  Yes, I know, I could switch to qmail, but for
various reasons, I'd rather not do this.  (I have too many programs, e.g.
mailing lists, etc. that are totally dependent on sendmail, andI don't
want to turn my installed-and-working-well system on its ear right now...)

Your advice is greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Donald
-- 
Donald Burr of Borg <dburr@borg-cube.com>     | FreeBSD: The Power to Serve!
WWW: http://www.borg-cube.com/  ICQ #16997506 | http://www.freebsd.org/
P.O. Box 91212, Santa Barbara, CA 93190-1212  \-----------------------------
Phone: (805)563-0672                            Present Day... Present Time!


To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message




Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20020907142455.P72460-100000>