I have a question, but first the background.
1] I am running RedHat 7.3.
2] I have a mail server running at my site, and have IMAP running as well. They both work.
3] I have sendmail configured so that relaying is denied by default, along with a bunch of other security directives from your standard linux security manuals.
4] I have some users created without home directories, without login shells, and belonging to group mail.
5] Going to a Windows box, I can create a user in MS Outlook or Netscape Messenger that can correctly log in and receive mail (via IMAP).
6] The same user can send mail OK to another user on the mail server host.
7] However, when attempting to send email to a user outside the mail server host, I get the message "Relaying denied".

Okay, that's the background. Now, I know if I add the IP address of the Windows box the user is using in the access file (e.g. xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx RELAY) and do the makemap hash on the access file.....well, THEN YES the user can send to the big wide world.

But I don't want to do that. For a variety of reasons, including the fact that the users don't always access mail from the same hosts. So, what I want to know is this:

With the standard RedHat 7.3 distribution, is there a way I can specify a user, say: user1@mysite.com in some sendmail file, do a makemap and voila - suddenly they can RELAY? Because I am not comfortable with the idea of doing source code changes to sendmail and trying to recompile - I just install the RPMS. I am confortable with configuring but not hacking.

I don't want to open my site to spammers, which is why I have relaying disabled in general. I just want to be able to specify users, such that they can come in and access their mail via IMAP, and then send mail via SMPT, with some way of SMPT recognizing them (they have logged into IMAP, after all), without having to recompile sendmail.

This should be an obvious problem that has occurred way many times before - so hopefully there is a simple solution.

BTW - I have tried adding user@mysite.com RELAY to the access file, doing makemap hash etc and then recycling sendmail - doesn't work. Seems like SMPT wants the IP address of their current host.

So - any ideas? SOMEBODY (lots of somebodies) must have had this problem before!

Sure can,

In the access file add the user's address as
From:user@domain.foo

Regards,
Peter