HP Unix mail options

[unix adm]

Hello Experts!

I am looking for mail options available from HP UX 11.23 and 11.31 apart from sendmail utility.

I am aware about elm/POP etc however as I inderstand they all are based on sendmail utility only.

In short basically all I need is My hp unix server sendmail emails without using some otehr utility where as sendmail is completely disabled.

Thanks and Regards
Rajeev/0096895223918

[unix adm]

Srry please read the above messages as !

Hello Experts!

I am looking for mail options available from HP UX 11.23 and 11.31 apart from sendmail utility.

I am aware about elm/POP etc however as I inderstand they all use sendmail only in background.

In short all I need is My HP unix server sending emails using some other utility where as sendmail is completely disabled.

Thanks and Regards
Rajeev/0096895223918

[TTr]

Your elm or any other mail program will still need to connect to an SMTP server to deliver the mail. What are you trying to avoid here? You do NOT need to have sendmail running as a service to send mails. That's for receiving email. When mailx or elm send emails they invoke a separate command-only copy of sendmail, they do NOT use the sendmail service that is already running.

[Doug O'Leary · Accepted solution]

Hey;

I can't be positive, but it seems you're mixing mail transfer agents (MTA) with mail user agents (MUA). MTAs are responsible for sending/receiving and routing mail messages. Sendmail is the probably the best known and most ubiquitous MTA. Postfix is another pretty well known one. While I've never used postfix, I've heard it's significantly easier than is sendmail.

MUAs are what you use to create, manipulate, and read email. elm and mailx are MUAs that come with HPUx. Pine is another *very* good UNIX based MUA; however, it hasn't been actively worked in a number of years. Alpine seems to be a current replacement for pine - I don't know if it's been ported to HPUX though.

MUAs don't actually *send* email; they simply pass it on to the MTA. For instance, even if sendmail is turned off, if you create an email in elm and hit send, it will kick off a sendmail instance to process your email.

So, short version: There are a variety of MUAs. The MUA will talk to the MTA to send your mail. The MTA doesn't have to be running all the time; however, that implies that your system won't receive email - a perfectly viable model. It does, however, have to be available to be able to send email off the system.

Hope that clears it up a bit.

Doug O'Leary

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

http://software.hp.com

Search for Internet Express.

There are a few MTA options there.

elm/pop will work with any Mail Tranfer Agent. They don't require sendmail.

SEP

[unix adm]

Thanks for your responses Guys!

Thesr are auditors who have been declaring sendmail as vulnurable and suggesting to use something else.

I am also not very what makes the sendmail so vulnurable, but cant argue much with them.


However I think now I am getting a bit of it now

1) As I don't need to recieve any emails on the HP box so I don't
need any sendmail (MTA) services/agents running locally and it can still connect
to the next relay agent and send the mails to the outside world.


2) I can use any other MTA apart from sendmail to send the email outside with there own or sendmail based configurations and all would still be agentless.


Provably I will be able to explain them now and if they still have problems using sendmail I will give another utility to use.

which would just mean eating the same food with "Different spoon".

I will submit the points soon.

Thanks Again
Rajeev

[Mel Burslan]

What the auditors (good ones at least) want to see is, sendmail not configured to start in daemon mode, listening to port 25 for incoming mail requests, where most bedlam happens when a new exploit surfaces. And if your organization have a mail relay server to handle incoming and outgoing external mail, there is no need for you to run a sendmail server on port 25 on your hpux servers.

As long as, in your /etc/rc.config.d/mailservs file, you have the line

export SENDMAIL_SERVER=0

auditors should be happy. Make sure, at the time of the audit, a rogue sysadmin not manually launch sendmail daemon and leave it running on the system as most auditors check the currently running system as well.

Good luck with the audit. It ain't fun...

[unix adm]

Thank you all !

I hope the auditors would be happy with no sendmail daemons running on the server and mails are still going outside.



Thanks and Regards
Rajeev