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Configuring Sendmail On Jaguar
Spock the Baptist writes "This website's recent article on the O'Reilly Network is by James Duncan Davidson, speaking at the recent O'Reilly Mac OS X Conference. PowerBook, and iBook owners will likely be intrested in this article, as sending e-mail from multiple locations is less trouble when done via sendmail rather than a remote mail serever. Also, if your ISP's mail server goes down you'll still be able to send outgoing e-mail which can be quite handy."
Relying on this (a local MTA) to send your mail is in general a terrible idea for dialup or consumer broadband accounts. First, many ISP's block or filter off-network port 25 traffic to prevent spammers from exploiting their service. Secondly, there are many many more ISP's who filter spam using dialup user lists - lists of IP addresses that are assigned to dialup or "home" broadband DSL/Cable/Wireless users. I personally know of over 50,000 mailboxes that would never recieve a message sent from an MTA on a dialup user list. I imagine that there are many more.
The proper way to run a remote MTA via your dialup or home broadband account is to set up (or have your isp configure) a permanently-connected upstream MTA that will allow you to use it as a smarthost via authenticated SMTP or SMTP/SSL. Tunneling this connection over ssh is a fairly sure-fire way to get around ISP's who block or redirect port 25 traffic to their own SMTP server. The only problem is that by the time you get that kind of a connection set up, you realize you could have solved your problem by tunneling your local port 25 to a "real" smtp server via ssh a lot easier than the headache you just went through setting up the godawful beast of sendmail.
If you're going to put any effort into setting up a mail server on your Darwin/OS X machine, then put in a little extra work and switch to postfix. And lucky for you, Graham Orndorff has put together a comprehensive tutorial on postfix (also imapd, fetchmail, and stunnel) for OS X on stepwise. This is a man who background includes 3 years at NeXT and 4 years as mail architect at WebTV. In other words, you should trust his opinion. And he even writes great documentation!
There's an ability in OS X Mail that I've not seen anywhere else. You can bounce mail. Maybe it's nothing new, but it's sure new to me. There's even a little icon you can put in the toolbar.
This, by itself, has single-handedly reduced my spam intake by 99%. Too bad Apple's own rules won't allow me to configure a spam-tastic auto-bouncing rubber inbox.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
Install/run Webmin....it will make admin'ing Postfix as easy as it gets.