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sigint-ninja 03-25-2014 05:36 PM
a question or two about sendmail
 
hi guys,

Is sendmail the most used mail server in the linux world? i know of postfix, but from i read its not as functional right?

can you connect to a sendmail server over the internet, or does it only service a LAN scenario?

can i connect to sendmail over the internet (if the above works) using outlook 2007?

is there a gui for sendmail? am i better off learning the command line?

would sendmail (though i realise its free) be as good (functional and usable) as microsoft exchange...say version 2010?

unSpawn 03-25-2014 06:04 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by sigint-ninja (Post 5141198)
Is sendmail the most used mail server in the linux world?
No idea. Would it help if it was?


Quote:
Originally Posted by sigint-ninja (Post 5141198)
i know of postfix, but from i read its not as functional right?
What's missing then?


Quote:
Originally Posted by sigint-ninja (Post 5141198)
can you connect to a sendmail server over the internet, or does it only service a LAN scenario?
Yes you can.


Quote:
Originally Posted by sigint-ninja (Post 5141198)
can i connect to sendmail over the internet (if the above works) using outlook 2007?
Sendmail, basically any MTA, is for sending and delivering email messages. Any client that is allowed to access a MTA, posesses the right credentials and knows how to talk RFC-compliant mail protocols should be able to talk to any MTA.


Quote:
Originally Posted by sigint-ninja (Post 5141198)
is there a gui for sendmail? am i better off learning the command line?
The latter.


Quote:
Originally Posted by sigint-ninja (Post 5141198)
would sendmail (though i realise its free) be as good (functional and usable) as microsoft exchange...say version 2010?
That depends on your definition of "as good": Exchange is a closed source, proprietary code, commercially-licensed product allowing for non-RFC-compliant messaging, calendaring and other "fun"...

sigint-ninja 03-25-2014 06:20 PM
thanks for your time...

sigint-ninja 03-25-2014 06:26 PM
Quote:
No idea. Would it help if it was?
just wondered what the most popular/most utilised system was, thats all?

Quote:
What's missing then?
you tell me...LOL!!!

last thing...is it possible to read and send mail entirely from the command line? is this
practical?

thanks again

TenTenths 03-26-2014 03:11 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by sigint-ninja (Post 5141215)
last thing...is it possible to read and send mail entirely from the command line?
Yes, you can make a telnet connection to the mail server and issue "raw" SMTP commands to send a mail, you can also cat the users mailbox file to see the mail that's been delivered.

Quote:
Originally Posted by sigint-ninja (Post 5141215)
is this practical?
NO, you're better off using a command line mail client such a mutt which is pretty lightweight but handy for sending short e-mails or file attachments from the command line.

chrism01 03-26-2014 03:27 AM
A small data point that may or may not be informative: Up until (& inc) v5, RHEL defaulted to sendmail,but as of v6 they went with postfix.
Make of that what you will...

TenTenths 03-26-2014 03:47 AM
We've postfix in-house and it's rather nice, we've MySQL database for aliases, LDAP lookup to decide if a user has a mailbox, web interface for Out Of Office, all easy enough to manage stuff.

For my own servers I use sendmail as I only need simple outbound mail handing as I've outsourced inbound mail.


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