sendmail newbie questions

[RedHat123]

can i have sendmail relay email from my test server to my isp mail server ?

where are the mail messages actually placed prior to being sent ?

after they are sent, are they still on my machine or do they get deleted and is this configurable ?

[SpookyFox]

To answer a couple of your questions...probably not as thoroughly as you'd like, but it's an answer, eh?

First, yes you can make sendmail relay your e-mail to another mail server.

The e-mails SHOULD be saved, but I'm not exactly sure where.

As an alternative, you should consider using Qmail instead of sendmail simply for its ease of configuration. When compared to sendmail, Qmail is a walk in the park.

Sendmail is tried and true, but the configuration is notoriously difficult. Check out Qmail! http://www.qmail.org

[RedHat123]

do i even need to relay ? how do i configure sendmail.mc to work with php and let me send mail to some external address such as some_test@yahoo.com etc

[SpookyFox]

I thought that I would need to use a relay when I was setting up my e-mail server for Bugzilla. You don't actually need it.

The big thing for me to figure out when I was configuring Qmail was that my computer domainname had to be different from the domain of the e-mail address. For example, if my domainname was llama and i was trying to send e-mail to fubar@llama.com, it was getting sent locally.

I'm not sure about getting php to work with the sendmail, but you should just have to have sendmail running and any mail that is sent to your server should be processed using sendmail.

I'm sure it's not quite that simple because it never is, but that would the quick explanation.

[RedHat123]

well the main thing i need to do is send mail to some remote email address from my server. relaying to another server (my isp in this case) would be ok, but if i dont need to then that would be better.

heck, just let me use evolution to send mail to my running instance of sendmail and have it route the mail to the remote address. how do i enable that ?

[SpookyFox]

Originally posted by RedHat123
well the main thing i need to do is send mail to some remote email address from my server. relaying to another server (my isp in this case) would be ok, but if i dont need to then that would be better.

heck, just let me use evolution to send mail to my running instance of sendmail and have it route the mail to the remote address. how do i enable that ?

I'm going to invoke my right of "I'm don't know" on this one. Usually, when you have e-mail that you're trying to send via the server, if it's queued to your sendmail installation but isn't sending, it is a misconfiguration. If the mail isn't being spooled on your server, I think it would be a problem with php.

I don't know specifics regarding enabling certain options, I just know that it is, in fact, possible to do such things. I would definately check out the man pages for sendmail, qmail, evolution, etc. and do some google searches to figure out some how-tos or something along those lines.

The nice way to say RTFM. :) Sorry I couldn't be of more help man!