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Date:      Sat, 6 Jul 2024 22:42:17 +0100
From:      Keith Gaughan <k@stereochro.me>
To:        ports@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Using dma for external incoming mail
Message-ID:  <95e13235-b3ed-44ef-a884-e5b9a335977c@stereochro.me>
In-Reply-To: <ZomITiPJuhngG1ap@www.zefox.net>
References:  <ZomITiPJuhngG1ap@www.zefox.net>

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On 06/07/2024 19:09, bob prohaska wrote:

 > Now that dma is the default mta for FreeBSD 14 I'd like to
 > give it a try.

The ports list probably isn't the venue for a question like this.

The forums are probably a better place to ask questions like this.

 > I'm puzzled by the manual page admonition:
 >
 > "...dma  is    not  intended  as  a  replacement  for    real,  big
 > MTAs...."
 >
 > What are the constraints preventing its use for receiving external
 > mail? It looks as if simply setting it to listen on port 25 will do
 > the job.

It's not a daemon and it doesn't listen on port 25.

It's intended to accept mail to send on standard input.

It then decided whether to append it to a file under /var/mail or to
send it on to a smarthost running a fully featured MTA, if one is
configured. It doesn't even support any non-trivial use of /etc/aliases.

I have DMA set up as the MTA on all of my servers that aren't
mailservers where it deals with any mail sent by the system or by
processes running on the server, and it forwards on everything to my
mailserver for processing. On my mailserver, I run Postfix and it
handles all incoming mail.

This is a reasonable default: the OS needs to be able to deliver system
email, and most servers don't need to receive email.

 > The host in question is private, with one real user (me) and four
 > email accounts. Total traffic flow is a few messages per day, mostly
 > from the FreeBSD mailing lists.

For that, you need a full MTA that can handle that. I use Postfix, but
Exim and OpenSMTPd are good options too.

 > My interest stems in part from the need to occasionally correspond
 > with gmail users. I find explicit instructions for setting up dma for
 > this purpose but have yet to find similar instruction for sendmail.

DMA isn't going to do what you want: you'll need to configure a full
MTA. My preference is for Postfix, but you should be able to install
Sendmail from packages or ports if you're familiar enough with it.

The FeeBSD handbook includes some documentation on the basics of setting
it up and how to replace DMA with a fully-featured MTA, though it uses
Postfix as its example.

K.



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