This section contains information related to 'transport agents', which means the underlying software that connects your local system to remote systems.
Smail3.1 seems to be a de-facto standard transport agent for uucp-only sites and for some smtp sites. It compiles without patching from the sources. In addition, smail is provided in binary form in the SLS distribution of Linux.
The newspak distribution contains config files for smail3.1.28 under Linux that you can use to start with.
If you're building smail from sources, you need to have CASE_NO_NEWLINES=true in your os/linux file so that 'sed' gives you shell scripts that work properly.
For a uucp-only system that has a MX-record and that wants a domainized header (who goes through a smart-host for everything), these are the entire config files you'll need:
#-------- /usr/local/lib/smail/config ----------------- # # domains we belong to visible_domain=subdomain.domain:uucp # # who we're known as (fully-qualified-site-name) visible_name=myhostname.subdomain.domain # # who we go through smart_path=my_uucp_neighbor # #---------- /usr/local/lib/smail/paths -------------- # # we're a domainized site, make sure we accept mail to both names myhostname %s myhostname.subdomain.domain %s # #-------------------------------------------------------------------To run smail as a smtp daemon, add the following to /etc/inetd.conf: smtp stream tcp nowait root /usr/bin/smtpd smtpd
Outgoing mail gets sent automatically, when using elm. If your internet link is down when you send mail, then the mail sits in "/usr/spool/smail/input". When the link next comes up, "runq" is run which causes the mail to be sent.
I run a uucp-only site and use sendmail5.65b+IDA1.5 instead of smail3.1.28 due to the incredible ease of use. There is a binary distribution on sunsite.unc.edu in pub/Linux/system/Mail
To install it...
Another nice thing is that if you have mail.debug set and you run syslogd, your incoming and outgoing mail messages will get logged. See the /etc/syslog.conf file for details.
The sources for sendmail+IDA may be found at uxc.cso.uiuc.edu. They require no patching to run under Linux.
If you're going to run sendmail+IDA, I strongly recommend you go to the sendmail5.67b+IDA1.5 version since all required Linux-specific patches are now in the vanilla sources and several security holes have been plugged that WERE (!!!) in the older version you may have grabbed or built before about December 1st, 1993.
Sendmail 8.6.x from Berkeley is the latest major revision after sendmail5. It has wonderful built-in support for building under Linux. Just "make linux" and you'll be all set.
The following also are known to run under Linux. Consult "archie" for details regarding how to find them...
Unlike most operating systems, Linux does not have mail "built-in". You'll need a program to deliver the local mail.
One good program is Rich Braun's "lmail" program, but I've switched to using the more commonly available "deliver" program.
Documentation for how to use either for local delivery is in the sendmail5.67b+IDA1.5 binary release (on sunsite) mentioned above.