Rewritten by &a.jim;, 02 December 1999. Original work done by &a.wlloyd;. Electronic Mail, better known as email, is one of the most widely used forms of communication today. Millions of people use email every day, and chances are if you are reading this online, you fall into that category and probably even have more than one email address. Electronic Mail configuration is the subject of many System Administration books. If you plan on doing anything beyond setting up one mailhost for your network, you need industrial strength help. Some parts of email configuration are controlled in the Domain Name System (DNS). If you are going to run your own DNS server, be sure to read through the files in /etc/namedb and man -k named. There are five major parts involved in an email exchange. They are: the user program, the server daemon, DNS, a pop or IMAP daemon, and of course, the mailhost itself. This includes command line programs such as mutt, pine, elm, and mail, and GUI programs such as balsa, xfmail to name a few, and something more sophisticated like a WWW browser. These programs simply pass off the email transactions to the local mailhost, either by calling one of the server daemons available or delivering it over TCP. This is usually sendmail (by default with FreeBSD) or one of the other mail server daemons such as qmail, postfix, or exim. There are others, but those are the most widely used. The server daemon usually has two functions—it looks after receiving incoming mail and delivers outgoing mail. It does not allow you to connect to it via POP or IMAP to read your mail. You need an additional daemon for that. Be aware that some older versions of sendmail have some serious security problems, however as long as you run a current version of it you should not have any problems. As always, it is a good idea to stay up-to-date with any software you run. The Domain Name System (DNS) and its daemon named play a large role in the delivery of email. In order to deliver mail from your site to another, the server daemon will look up the site in the DNS to determine the host that will receive mail for the destination. It works the same way when you have mail sent to you. The DNS contains the database mapping hostname to an IP address, and a hostname to mailhost. The IP address is specified in an A record. The MX (Mail eXchanger) record specifies the mailhost that will receive mail for you. If you do not have an MX record for your hostname, the mail will be delivered directly to your host. Receiving mail for your domain is done by the mail host. It will collect mail sent to you and store it for reading or pickup. In order to pick the stored mail up, you will need to connect to the mail host. This is done by either using POP or IMAP. If you want to read mail directly on the mail host, then a POP or IMAP server is not needed. If you want to run a POP or IMAP server, there are two things you need to do: Get a POP or IMAP daemon from the Ports Collection and install it on your system. Modify /etc/inetd.conf to load the POP or IMAP server. The mail host is the name given to a server that is responsible for delivering and receiving mail for your host, and possibly your network. Here are some frequently asked questions and answers. These have been migrated from the FAQ. Why do I have to use the FQDN for hosts on my site? You will probably find that the host is actually in a different domain; for example, if you are in foo.bar.edu and you wish to reach a host called mumble in the bar.edu domain, you will have to refer to it by the fully-qualified domain name, mumble.bar.edu, instead of just mumble. Traditionally, this was allowed by BSD BIND resolvers. However the current version of BIND that ships with FreeBSD no longer provides default abbreviations for non-fully qualified domain names other than the domain you are in. So an unqualified host mumble must either be found as mumble.foo.bar.edu, or it will be searched for in the root domain. This is different from the previous behavior, where the search continued across mumble.bar.edu, and mumble.edu. Have a look at RFC 1535 for why this was considered bad practice, or even a security hole. As a good workaround, you can place the line: search foo.bar.edu bar.edu instead of the previous: domain foo.bar.edu into your /etc/resolv.conf. However, make sure that the search order does not go beyond the boundary between local and public administration, as RFC 1535 calls it. Sendmail says mail loops back to myself This is answered in the sendmail FAQ as follows: * I am getting Local configuration error messages, such as: 553 relay.domain.net config error: mail loops back to myself 554 <user@domain.net>... Local configuration error How can I solve this problem? You have asked mail to the domain (e.g., domain.net) to be forwarded to a specific host (in this case, relay.domain.net) by using an MX record, but the relay machine does not recognize itself as domain.net. Add domain.net to /etc/sendmail.cw (if you are using FEATURE(use_cw_file)) or add Cw domain.net to /etc/sendmail.cf. The sendmail FAQ is in /usr/src/usr.sbin/sendmail and is recommended reading if you want to do any tweaking of your mail setup. How can I do email with a dial-up PPP host? You want to connect a FreeBSD box on a lan, to the Internet. The FreeBSD box will be a mail gateway for the lan. The PPP connection is non-dedicated. There are at least two ways to do this. The other is to use UUCP. The key is to get a Internet site to provide secondary MX service for your domain. For example: bigco.com. MX 10 bigco.com. MX 20 smalliap.com. Only one host should be specified as the final recipient (add Cw bigco.com in /etc/sendmail.cf on bigco.com). When the senders' sendmail is trying to deliver the mail it will try to connect to you over the modem link. It will most likely time out because you are not online. sendmail will automatically deliver it to the secondary MX site, i.e., your Internet provider. The secondary MX site will try every (sendmail_flags = -bd -q15m in /etc/rc.conf) 15 minutes to connect to your host to deliver the mail to the primary MX site. You might want to use something like this as a login script. #!/bin/sh # Put me in /usr/local/bin/pppbigco ( sleep 60 ; /usr/sbin/sendmail -q ) & /usr/sbin/ppp -direct pppbigco If you are going to create a separate login script for a user you could use sendmail -qRbigco.com instead in the script above. This will force all mail in your queue for bigco.com to be processed immediately. A further refinement of the situation is as follows. Message stolen from the &a.isp;. > we provide the secondary MX for a customer. The customer connects to > our services several times a day automatically to get the mails to > his primary MX (We do not call his site when a mail for his domains > arrived). Our sendmail sends the mailqueue every 30 minutes. At the > moment he has to stay 30 minutes online to be sure that all mail is > gone to the primary MX. > > Is there a command that would initiate sendmail to send all the mails > now? The user has not root-privileges on our machine of course. In the privacy flags section of sendmail.cf, there is a definition Opgoaway,restrictqrun Remove restrictqrun to allow non-root users to start the queue processing. You might also like to rearrange the MXs. We are the 1st MX for our customers like this, and we have defined: # If we are the best MX for a host, try directly instead of generating # local config error. OwTrue That way a remote site will deliver straight to you, without trying the customer connection. You then send to your customer. Only works for hosts, so you need to get your customer to name their mail machine customer.com as well as hostname.customer.com in the DNS. Just put an A record in the DNS for customer.com. The following section covers more involved topics such as mail configuration and setting up mail for your entire domain. Out of the box, you should be able send email to external hosts as long as you have set up /etc/resolv.conf or are running your own name server. If you would like to have mail for your host delivered to that specific host, there are two methods: Run your own name server and have your own domain. For example, FreeBSD.org Get mail delivered directly to your host. This is done by delivering mail directly to the current DNS name for your machine. For example, example.FreeBSD.org. Regardless of which of the above you choose, in order to have mail delivered directly to your host, you must have a permanent (static) IP address (no dynamic PPP dial-up). If you are behind a firewall, it must pass SMTP traffic on to you. If you want to receive mail at your host itself, you need to be sure of one of two things: Make sure that the MX record in your DNS points to your host's IP address. Make sure there is no MX entry in your DNS for your host. Either of the above will allow you to receive mail directly at your host. Try this: &prompt.root; hostname example.FreeBSD.org &prompt.root; host example.FreeBSD.org example.FreeBSD.org has address 204.216.27.XX If that is what you see, mail directly to yourlogin@example.FreeBSD.org should work without problems. If instead you see something like this: &prompt.root; host example.FreeBSD.org example.FreeBSD.org has address 204.216.27.XX example.FreeBSD.org mail is handled (pri=10) by hub.FreeBSD.org All mail sent to your host (example.FreeBSD.org will end up being collected on hub under the same username instead of being sent directly to your host. The above information is handled by your DNS server. The DNS record that carries mail routing information is the Mail eXchange entry. If no MX record exists, mail will be delivered directly to the host by way of its IP address. The MX entry for freefall.FreeBSD.org at one time looked like this: freefall MX 30 mail.crl.net freefall MX 40 agora.rdrop.com freefall MX 10 freefall.FreeBSD.org freefall MX 20 who.cdrom.com As you can see, freefall had many MX entries. The lowest MX number is the host that ends up receiving the mail in the end while the others will queue mail temporarily if freefall is busy or down. Alternate MX sites should have separate Internet connections from your own in order to be the most useful. Your ISP or other friendly site should have no problem providing this service for you. In order to set up a mailhost (a.k.a., mail server) you need to have any mail sent to various workstations directed to it. Basically, you want to hijack any mail for your domain (in this case *.FreeBSD.org) and divert it to your mail server so your users can check their mail via POP or directly on the server. To make life easiest, a user account with the same username should exist on both machines. Use adduser to do this. The mailhost you will be using must be the designated mail exchange for each workstation on the network. This is done in your DNS configuration like so: example.FreeBSD.org A 204.216.27.XX ; Workstation MX 10 hub.FreeBSD.org ; Mailhost This will redirect mail for the workstation to the mailhost no matter where the A record points. The mail is sent to the MX host. You cannot do this yourself unless you are running a DNS server. If you are not, or cannot, run your own DNS server, talk to your ISP or whoever does your DNS for you. If you're doing virtual email hosting, the following information will come in handy. For the sake of an example, we will assume you have a customer with their own domain, in this case customer1.org and you want all the mail for customer1.org sent to your mailhost, which is named mail.myhost.com. The entry in your DNS should look like this: customer1.org MX 10 mail.myhost.com You do not need an A record if you only want to handle email for the domain. Be aware that this means pinging customer1.org will not work unless an A record exists for it. The last thing that you must do is tell sendmail on your mailhost what domains and/or hostnames it should be accepting mail for. There are a few different ways this can be done. Either of the following will work: Add the hosts to your /etc/sendmail.cw file if you are using the FEATURE(use_cw_file). If you are using sendmail 8.10 or higher, the file is /etc/mail/local-host-names. Add a Cwyour.host.com line to your /etc/sendmail.cf or /etc/mail/sendmail.cf if you are using sendmail 8.10 or higher.