path: root/README.SENDMAIL

Mailman - The GNU Mailing List Management System
Copyright (C) 1998,1999,2000,2001,2002 by the Free Software Foundation, Inc.
59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA

SECURITY NOTE

    You may be tempted to set the DELIVERY_MODULE configuration
    variable in mm_cfg.py to `Sendmail' when using the Sendmail MTA.
    Don't.  The Sendmail.py module is misnamed -- it's really a
    command line based message handoff scheme as opposed to the SMTP
    scheme used in SMTPDirect (the default).  Sendmail.py has known
    security holes and is provided as a proof-of-concept only.  If you
    are having problems using SMTPDirect.py please fix those instead
    of using Sendmail.py, or you may open your system up to security
    exploits.


SENDMAIL `smrsh' COMPATIBILITY

    Many newer versions of Sendmail come with a restricted execution
    utility called "smrsh", which limits the executables that Sendmail
    will allow to be used as mail filter programs.  You need to
    explicitly allow Mailman's wrapper program to be used with smrsh
    before it will work.  If mail is not getting delivered to
    Mailman's wrapper program and you're getting an "operating system
    error" in your mail syslog, this could be your problem.

    One good way of doing this is to:

        - cd into /etc/smrsh (or where ever it happens to reside on
          your system, such as /var/smrsh or /usr/local/smrsh).

        - create a symbolic link to Mailman's wrapper program

    For example, if you've installed Mailman in the standard location,
    you can just execute these commands (you might have to do these as
    root):

        % cd /etc/smrsh
        % ln -s /usr/local/mailman/mail/mailman mailman


INTEGRATING SENDMAIL AND MAILMAN

    David Champion has contributed a recipe for more closely
    integrating Sendmail and Mailman, such that Sendmail will
    automatically recognize and deliver to new mailing lists as they
    are created, without having to manually edit alias tables.

    In the contrib directory, you will find four files

    mm-handler.readme - an explanation of how to set everything up
    mm-handler        - the mail delivery agent (MDA)
    mailman.mc        - a toy configuration file sample
    virtusertable     - a sample for RFC 2142 address exceptions


PERFORMANCE NOTES

    One of the surest performance killers for Sendmail users is when
    Sendmail is configured to synchronously verify the recipient's
    host via DNS.  If it does this for messages posted to it from
    Mailman, you will get horrible performance.  Since Mailman usually
    connects via localhost (i.e. 127.0.0.1) to the SMTP port of
    Sendmail, you should be sure to configure Sendmail /not/ to do DNS
    verification synchronously for localhost connections.



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