required no inbound mails

[Kurtkarl]

Hi,

We need to setup one of our server here not to accept inbound mails from anywhere but can send outbound mails locally and thru internet.

As temp solution we disabled the sendmail process inorder for us not to accept any inbound mails. But without this sendmail process running we cant even send outbound mails locally or anywhere. We have an apps that needs to send outbound mails locally and thru internet. BTW, this machine is running client DNS.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks
Joey

[Uday_S_Ankolekar]

Hi,

If you stop sendmail process that should stop receiveing inbound mails. Your outbound mails should work even if sendmail is not running.
-USA..

[Christopher Caldwell]

Remove -bd from sendmail daemon startup options but keep -q15m (or whatever) so sendmail will retry message delivery if the first attempt fails.

[Tom Geudens]

Hi,
There's probably a simple solution for this (I'm far from a sendmail specialist :-) but
have you looked at the "Anti-spamming"-parameters of sendmail ? You can "lockout"
certain IP's (if there aren't too many that
can reach the server) that way.

Hope it helps,
Tom Geudens

[Joseph Chakkery]

Hello,

(1) Stop sendmail by
# /sbin/init.d/sendmail stop
(2) edit /etc/rc.config.d/mailservs file
change SENDMAIL_SERVER=0 and then save the file. This will disable sendmail daemon starting during startup.

Regards
Joe.

[Craig Rants]

If like you said you have stopped sendmail and you are not able to send mail, then you have another problem, recieving and sending mail are total independent of each other. You need the daemon running to receive, not to send.

Try sending a message in verbose mode

sendmail -v user@hostname.com < /etc/hosts

The detailed output should help in your troubleshooting.

Good Luck,
C

[Kurtkarl]

Thanks for the immediate reply.

Actually, we already stoped our sendmail by disabling it thru /sbin/init.d and killing the process. It works with us because we can no longer receive inbound mails. But the thing is, we wanted to send mails outside our box (meaning locally and thru internet). We cant have this thing work. I know that disabling sendmail will still allow us to send mails outside but this time it does not allow us. Any suggestions?

Also I'm using reflection on our unix box but I'm having problem with my "@" char mapping. Everytime I press this key it acts as carriage return. thanks again joey

[Bernie Vande Griend]

Joey,
Have you tried doing what Christoper suggests? I agree that normally you should be able to send mail out without the daemon running, but depending on your configuration, it may help to have the sendmail daemon running, but only in a mode for sending out requests, not receiving. To do this remove the "-bd" from /sbin/init.d/sendmail but keep the "-q15m" (or whatever) option. Then run this script and see if you can send out mail. With sendmail running this way, you will NOT receive incoming message and it may resolve your problem.

[Kurtkarl]

Whenever I try to send mail with our sendmail process disabled I always received this error and I didn't received my test mail as well.

$mailx -s "test" username@domain < /etc/hosts
$ mail: can't send to username@domain
Mail saved in /homedir/dead.letter

thanks
joey

[Christopher Caldwell]

#/sbin/init.d/sendmail stop
to stop sendmail

#/usr/sbin/sendmail -q15m

will start sendmail (not in daemon mode) so that sendmail runs the queue every fifteen minutes without accepting inbound connections.

If you're satisfied with the way that works,
change
/usr/sbin/sendmail -bd -q30m
to
/usr/sbin/sendmail -q15m

in /sbin/init.d/sendmail

The stop command (/sbin/init.d/sendmail stop or killsm) won't work anymore, but you can figure out the ps command you need to use to find sendmail and kill it.