Using sendmail through port 80?
 

Hello. Is there a way to send email through port 80? The reason I ask is I'm currently only allowed port 80 to be open on my box, but I need to be able to send email (add a link on a webpage to send email sort of thing). As far as I know this means I also need sendmail's default port (port 25?) opened in addition to port 80. Does anyone know if this is the case, or can I just redirect sendmail to use port 80 somehow?

It's not that port 25 is sendmail's per se, but port 25 is for smtp traffic.

Why are you only allowed port 80? Is this your server? I don't know if you can use port 80 for smtp traffic. Someone else would have to jump in here for that.

Well my server mimics a customer's server, and I've been told I'm only guaranteed port 80 is open, however I've seen otherwise. So I'm trying to gauge whether I can use port 80 for sending email traffic through or state that in order to use email, I need port 25 opened also. I have a feeling the latter would not be a big deal, but I wanted to investigate my options first.

I suspect you are confused between ports which are open for incoming connections and ports which are open for outgoing connections.

They probably mean that machines elsewhere on the internet can only connect to port 80 on your machine.
When you send email you connect to port 25 on a different machine.

If you intend your server to receive mail you will need to use port 25. If you only want to send e-mail then it shouldn't matter what port you are listening on so long as your clients are configured correctly.

>If you only want to send e-mail then it shouldn't matter what >port you are listening on
Uh, an email client dosn't listen on a port at all.

A client doesn't but if you want to set your server up to relay e-mail for your clients then you can run your smtp service on any port to listen for connections from your clients.

Thanks for the great feedback, I appreciate it. I only need to send 1 automated email per day, I don't care about receiving or relaying any emails or anyone replying to this email. I found that I need to have sendmail running as a daemon to get any emails sent from my machine: using "sendmail me@whatever.com" doesn't actually get sent until I "service sendmail start". I'd prefer not to have sendmail running all the time since I only need it for like 10 millseconds per day, so the best I figure I can start the service, send my email, then stop the service.

zaphodiv> thanks for clearing that up, I did misunderstand the outgoing versus incoming port issue