Hi.


Is it possible to send mail (to remote servers on for example the local network) from a linux box without running sendmail/postfix? If so, how? I thought one needed a MTA such as sendmail/postfix to be able to send mail to other physical servers..


Regards,
kenneho

Just connect to a remote SMTP server directly. The point of running one locally is to allow other programs just just give an email to the local system, via the sendmail program, without having to care what happens next. if you don't have that, you can configure many mail clients to send mail directly to a remote system.

Thanks, I didn't know that mail clients could do that. I knew it could be done, since one can telnet/netcat to the port and issue commands there, but didn't know that mail clients had this feature.

Now let me introduce the next problem: My collegaue says that one of our servers are configured to send mail to a remote host, but he's not sure how it works. And since neigher sendmail or postfix is running, there must be a mail client that's sending the emails. I don't know if the email client is a in linux or within the application that runs on the server. Do you know any trick to find out which application is sending the mails?

Hi,

Looking at the original (source) of a message you got from that system reveals a lot of info, for example:

From: Hans <snipped>
User-Agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.21 (Windows/20090302)
MIME-Version: 1.0

These three lines tell who send it (snipped confidential data), what Mail Client was used to send it, in this case Thunderbird from Windows machine, and the MIME version. A lot more information shows up in the source of the message, such as which is the originating server and so on.

Kind regards,

Eric

Thanks for the tip. I think I just found whick client it was though, but I'll make note of your advice and save that for next time.