dewey@execu.UUCP (Dewey Henize) (12/11/88)
Hello. With the holiday season coming, I'm going to waste a few hours of my employers time and attempt to get a 'smart' mail system going. I am, however, VERY confused about all this so I'm asking help from those of you that have fought this battle before, so I don't reinvent the wheel. Environment: We have a group of varied machines, including Sun's, Ultrix based Vaxen, HP's and others. We are currently running pretty much plain vanilla senmail, with one Sun handling our UUCP traffic and making mail look like it all comes from there. I have aliases set up such that mail coming into the system gets rerouted to users at the appropriate machines. We use YP on all the systems because of a very low number of system admin types (me, mostly) and a large and very often changing number of hosts. We have an Internet number assiged for us, as execu.com. So far, management hasn't approved the finances for a gateway, so we haven't done much else along that line till we convince them it's needed. It'll happen, but the time frame is <ahem> flexible. So for now, we have to assume complete dependence on dialout connections. Goal: I'd much like to get our mail setup running a lot smarter. I have a copy of smail and pathalias, and for that matter run a set of maps through pathalias every night. We manually try to determine paths from this output but its not exactly a user friendly way to go about things. I've tried to RTFM but it confuses me. I end up with more questions at the end than I do answers. I keep coming back to the sendmail.cf file and after a bit it looks like I'm going in circles. So, is there anyone with a set of papers that you might be able to send that would help me? One of the biggest goals is that the nasty paths generated by replies to usenet articles would be cleaned up and optimized a bit, but it would also be wonderful if most of my user base could have a simpler, more obvious method of sending mail than trying to look up the address with our shell file and then hopefully typing it in correctly. I'm not looking to aggressively reroute mail passing through. Seems that causes more problems than its worth overall. I WOULD like to reroute the mail that arrives here and dies because of a bad path, and I would like to generate addresses (or restructure addresses) from mail and replies that come from here. I would guess that anything informative enough to help me would be fairly long, so please e-mail to me. I'll keep it all and would be more than willing to pass it on should others so wish. Thanks in advance for any and all help. Dewey Henize Execucom Systems Corp -- -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- | There is nothing in the above message that can't be explained by sunspots. | | execu!dewey Dewey Henize | | Can you say standard disclaimer? I knew you could. Somehow... |