Linux Network Administrator Guide, Second Edition

The more commonly used transports available to you using the MAILER macro are described in the following list:

local

This transport includes both the local delivery agent used to send mail into the mailbox of users on this machine and the prog mailer used to send messages to local programs. This transport is included by default.

smtp

This transport implements the Simple Mail Transport Protocol (SMTP), which is the most common means of transporting mail on the Internet. When you include this transport, four mailers are configured: smtp (basic SMTP), esmtp (Extended SMTP), smtp8 (8bit binary clean SMTP), and relay (specifically designed for gatewaying messages between hosts).

uucp

The uucp transport provides support for two mailers: uucp- old, which is the traditional UUCP, and uucp-new, which allows multiple recipients to be handled in one transfer.

usenet

This mailer allows you to send mail messages directly into Usenet style news networks. Any local message directed to an address of news.group.usenet will be fed into the news network for the news.group newsgroup.

fax

If you have the HylaFAX software installed, this mailer will allow you to direct email to it so that you may build an email-fax gateway. This feature is experimental at the time of writing and more information may be obtained from http://www.vix.com/hylafax/.

There are others, such as the pop, procmail, mail11, phquery, and cyrus that are useful, but less common. If your curiosity is piqued, you can read about these in the sendmail book or the documentation supplied in the source package.

Configure mail routing for local hosts

The Virtual Brewery's configuration is probably more complex than most sites require. Most sites today would use the SMTP transport only and do not have to deal with UUCP at all. In our configuration we've configured a 'smart host' that is used to handle all outgoing mail. Since we are using the SMTP transport on our local network we must tell sendmail that it is not to send local mail via the smart host. The LOCAL_NET_CONFIG macro allows you to insert sendmail rules directly into the output sendmail.cf to modify the way that local mail is handled. We'll talk more about rewrite rules later on, but for the moment you should accept that the rule we've supplied in our example specifies that any mail destined for hosts in the vbrew.com domain should be delivered directly to the target hosts using the SMTP mail transport.

Generating the sendmail.cf File

When you have completed editing your m4 configuration file, you must process it to produce the /etc/mail/sendmail.cf file read by sendmail. This is straightforward, as illustrated by the following example:

# cd /etc/mail
# m4 /usr/share/sendmail.cf/m4/cf.m4 vstout.uucpsmtp.mc ›sendmail.cf

This command invokes the m4 macro processor, supplying it the name of two macro definition files to process. m4 processes the files in the order given. The first file is a standard sendmail macro template supplied with the sendmail source package, the second, of course, is the file containing our own macro definitions. The output of the command is directed to the /etc/mail/sendmail.cf file, which is our target file.

You may now start sendmail with the new configuration.

Interpreting and Writing Rewrite Rules

Arguably the most powerful feature of sendmail is the rewrite rule. Rewrite rules are used by sendmail to determine how to process a received mail message. sendmail passes the addresses from the headers of a mail message through collections of rewrite rules called rulesets The rewrite rules transform a mail address from one form to another and you can think of them as being similar to a command in your editor that replaces all text matching a specified pattern with another.

Each rule has a lefthand side and a righthand side, separated by at least one tab character. When sendmail is processing mail it scans through the rewriting rules looking for a match on the lefthand side. If an address matches the lefthand side of a rewrite rule, the address is replaced by the righthand side and processed again.

sendmail.cf R and S Commands

In the sendmail.cf file, the rulesets are defined using commands coded as S n, where n specifies the ruleset that is considered the current one.

The rules themselves appear in commands coded as R. As each R command is read, it is added to the current ruleset.

If you're dealing only with the sendmail.mc file, you won't need to worry about S commands at all, as the macros will build those for you. You will need to manually code your R rules.

A sendmail ruleset therefore looks like:

S n
R lhs rhs
R lhs2 rhs2

Some Useful Macro Definitions

sendmail uses a number of standard macro definitions internally. The most useful of these in writing rulesets are: