A first Guide for e-mail installation

Last Update 2003-02-22

Intention

This is a draft, it isn't finished at all!

This guide gives some very rough hints about the things to do when you setup e-mail for a small domain or a single computer. It is not intended as a full blown description, but just as a collection of hints, of DOs and DON'Ts. The MTA I will describe is sendmail (the current version can be found at ftp.sendmail.org .) There are others available too, but I'm used to sendmail and I recommend it. Please send comments/suggestions to me.

Assumptions

We assume the following for this guide: The name of your domain is MY.DOM.AIN. The mailhost in this domain is MAIL.MY.DOM.AIN. You have a direct connection to the Internet, your system is (most of the time) online.

DNS Setup

Your domain is registered in the DNS, right? Now you also need to register MX records to receive e-mail.
MY.DOM.AIN. IN  MX      10 MAIL.MY.DOM.AIN.
Now every e-mail to USER@MY.DOM.AIN is delivered to USER@MAIL.MY.DOM.AIN

Please use MX Records!

Please use an MX record, even if you have an A record for MY.DOM.AIN ! There is a simple reason for this: All MTAs (should) use the MX record to deliver e-mail. If you don't have one, they will ask the DNS for it anyway. So each time an e-mail will be delivered to your domain, a request for the MX record will be made. If there is one, it is at least a chance that it has been cached, so no need to contact your DNS server for each e-mail. If there is none, this will unnecessary increase internet traffic and slow down the delivery of your e-mail. This is also explained in the book "Sendmail" pg. 217.

Don't let your MX record point to a CNAME! This is a violation of RFC 974 , and most likely it will break some things. (Excerpt: Note that the algorithm to delete irrelevant RRs breaks if LOCAL has a alias and the alias is listed in the MX records for REMOTE. (E.g. REMOTE has an MX of ALIAS, where ALIAS has a CNAME of LOCAL). This can be avoided if aliases are never used in the data section of MX RRs. )
This is also explained in the book "Sendmail" pg. 213f.

RFC 974 explains how e-mail is delivered, i.e., how to use MX records, etc.

sendmail Setup

Assuming that you have sendmail V8 (compiled and) installed on your machine, you have to adopt sendmail.cf or create it from a .mc file in SENDMAIL/cf/cf. The README in SENDMAIL/cf explains very well what you need to know for special cases. The simplest way to get a working configuration is to use one of the examples and adopt it to your needs. I won't explain any special stuff here, but a simple setup (as given in the assumptions above ). Choose one of the example files named cs-OS.mc where OS matches the operating system of your mailhost. We'll take SunOS 4.1.x for this guide, so the file is cs-sunos4.1.mc The important lines are:
VERSIONID(`@(#)cs-sunos4.1.mc   8.3 (Berkeley) 8/6/95')
OSTYPE(sunos4.1)dnl
DOMAIN(CS.Berkeley.EDU)dnl
MAILER(local)dnl
MAILER(smtp)dnl
Theoretically you just have to change this to:
VERSIONID(`@(#)cs-sunos4.1.mc   8.3 (MY.DOM.AIN) 04/21/96')
MASQUERADE_AS(MY.DOM.AIN)
OSTYPE(sunos4.1)dnl
MAILER(local)dnl
MAILER(smtp)dnl
And there you go... (use m4 my-dom-ain.mc > sendmail.cf to generate the sendmail.cf file). Now you need to add all names for which your host should receive e-mail to the class w, e.g.,
CwMY.DOM.AIN.
CwMAIL.MY.DOM.AIN

If this doesn't fulfill your needs, you need to read a little bit more.


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Copyright © Claus Aßmann Please send comments to: <ca at sendmail.org>
Disclaimer: the information provided may be inaccurate or outdated or incomplete. Please contact me if you find an error.