Sendmail on Linux?

C

Carlosinfl

Loves the juice
Joined
Sep 25, 2002
Messages
6,633
I was told that all distros (or most) come with "Sendmail"
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I was told that the main thing to get started is to make sure that you have the most recent version of "sendmail" which according to their URL is 8.13.0.

Should I follow these instructions: install help

or since I already have this installed on Fedora Core 2, should I somehow do a upgrade?
I am not even sure what version I have but I must get rid of my Exchange Server since I am leaving the company and my license key for Exchange expires.

So I guess I don't know if I should still install the new version on top of the old or if there is a proper way to upgrade...or even if I have the most recent version.

Thanks for any help on getting mail set up on my server.
 
Since you use Fedora, you should just use yum to update it.

Code: 
yum update sendmail
 
ahh, that is pretty cool - is there a way in console that I can see what version I am using?

Code: 
sendmail -v

:confused:
 
I think the -v argument is to make it run in verbose mode.

One way I know of is to start sendmail, and then "telnet localhost 25" and see what the message spits out.
 
huh - man I wish I was stronger with Linux - it gets so frustrating with out someone who knows what they are doing - Thanks for your help! :p
 
Code: 
sendmail -d0.1 -bt < /dev/null

Will print the version of sendmail you have and the options it was compiled with.
 
A lot of people are moving away from sendmail...

Debian uses Exim by default & we, here at work, use Exim as the SMTP server for about 6-700 users (plus being backup relay for some of the other depts on campus).
 
ameoba said:
A lot of people are moving away from sendmail...

Debian uses Exim by default & we, here at work, use Exim as the SMTP server for about 6-700 users (plus being backup relay for some of the other depts on campus).
Click to expand...
I wouldn't say "a lot" of people are moving away from sendmail. I'd say "some" people are moving away from sendmail. I think more people are staying with Sendmail than are moving away from it. It's still the default MTA in OpenBSD (come on, if OpenBSD still allows it in the base system it can't be that big of a security problem), FreeBSD, NetBSD (although they have Postfix in the base system as well), lots of Linux distributions (Fedora Core and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, among others) and lots of commercial Unix implementations. Sendmail is still the number one MTA and it will probably be the top dog for a long, long time. Sendmail isn't going anywhere. People seem to have this unfounded, inane fear of sendmail.

I like sendmail, and if you plan on doing any real unix admin work---especially in a commercial environment---you should at least learn how to work with it. Sendmail isn't hard to work with and security has been pretty decent in the past few years. Everyone whines and hand-wrings about sendmail being hard to administer, a security nightmare, etc...They aren't seeing the big picture. Sendmail's admin isn't the most intuitive thing, however generally you don't have to mess with it once it's set up. All you have to do is stay on top of updates/security fixes/etc., which honesty have been pretty infrequent recently.

Sendmail is a good MTA. It will do what you want, and sendmail will do anything you want it to do with your mail once you figure out how to massage it the right way. It's been serving mail needs since 1983 (under the name sendmail) and back to 1979 (when it was called delivermail).

Don't be a lazy admin and you won't get burned by sendmail. That's all there is to it. Don't get me wrong...If you have real, legitimate reasons for using something besides sendmail, like you came in to a shop that was already running something else, fine, but don't knock sendmail on hearsay and false information.

666: you don't need a GUI for a mail server.
 
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