Local mail server?

[Energon]

I'm wanting to setup a local mail server on my workstation... it won't server any mail to anyone but the people on the actual workstation... I'm wanting this for things like cron mailings and forwarding root's mail to my account... I have Slackware 8.0, so I have both sendmail and procmail, but I'm not sure which one I would use for this... so can anyone point me to which app to use and to a site that'll help me set it up for just local mail and nothing external?

[spickus]

The default install of sendmail in Slack 7.1 does just what you want. I bet it's the same in 8.0.

[Morphine]

If you are gonna use sendmail, and you want root emails and system messages <cron daemon and others> to point to your local email account. First thing to do is to edit your aliases file </etc/aliases>, scroll down until you see, Person who should get root's mail, root: <username>. Then save that file, and type "newaliases" that refreshes the aliases list. As for running cron messages and so forth, that points to root anyway, and after you do that with the aliases file, root messages will point to you. Have fun.

[Energon]

Okay... I've got sendmail running using just the default configuration from Slack 8.0 (for smtp)... are there any security risks form this? i've got a firewall that lets me access mail servers, but this machine doesn't act as one (won't accept those packets)... I've also got nothing uncommented in inetd.conf, so am I as locked down as possible for this setup? I'm trying to avoid any holes since this is just for local mail services and nothing else...

Thanks for the help... :)

[Craig McPherson]

If you still want to be able to mail out to the Internet but not accept incoming SMTP, have your firewall block new SMTP connections (ipchains using the TCP SYN flag or iptables using STATe).

If you don't even want your mail server to be able to send out, have the firewall block all traffic on port 25.

You should also have your mail server set up to not relay for foreign domains, just so you'll have an extra level of security in place.

Portscan your machine from outside your network, using a FULL TCP and UDP scan of every port (which may take several days on a slow link) to get a good idea of how your box looks from outside. Any services that are open from the outside, decide whether or not you need them open, and if you do, make sure they're locked down.