[aclug-L] Re: RoadRunner Mail question

[Chris Owen <owenc@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 8 Aug 2001, Jeff Vian wrote:

> The outbound mail (SMTP) server needs to be the one used by kscable
> (or the DSL provider) since they normally allow mail to be sent only
> from within their ip address space.
>
> It does not care what is used as the return(from) or reply-to
> addresses.

That is probably a reasonable assumption (and in the case of RoadRunner I
think it is true), but it certainly isn't a guarantee.  Only recently I
learned that Southwind did not allow relaying from host names other than
what the mail server knew about.  I was surprised by this but apparently
it used to be the case.

> This config requires sendmail to be running on the host that is
> running fetchmail, so I do NOT have these set up on my Linux firewall.
> I do not want to let anyone use my server to bounce spam and I have
> been too busy to take the time and set up sendmail to prevent
> bouncing.

Any reasonably recent (ie last 3 years) installation of sendmail should
disallow relaying from anything other than localhost unless you
specifically allow it to.  It should accept email for any domain that is
local to that machine, but it shouldn't relay anything by default.

Only hosts specified in /etc/mail/access (or wherever your OS places it)
should be able to relay.

If your sendmail installation is old enough to have relaying on by default
you've probably got bigger problems than spam ;-]

Chris

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