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RE: [LUG] exim & smtp in general.



On 24-Feb-00 at 00:39:55 Alex Charrett wrote:
> I would like to set up a server so that the only way a client such as
> Outlook etc can only send mail via the server if the user authenticates
> themselves with tehir system password.  However, the thought occours that
> other servers connect via the smtp port to deliver mail to the
> system.  Would setting smtp authentication interfere with incoming mail
> destined for local delivery?
> 
Yes. However with exim you specify which *hosts* are to authenticate with
yours. If you specify '*' (i.e. all hosts) then all hosts have to
authenticate with yours before they can send mail to you. In that respect I
imagine you would lose a lot of mail :-) You cannot be selective on the
mailer used as far as I know.

> The other thing I am unclear on is the operation of the system mail
> aliases.  Under sendmail wenever I changed the /etc/aliases I needed to
> run "newaliases" to update the alias.db.  There seems to be nothing of
> this sort under exim so I assume that it just reads straight from the text
> file.  Is this a resonable assumption?
>
Yes. If you use NDBM (or whatever) for the file lookup then you
create/modify the text file and then rebuild the database file - we do this
using CDB lookups for our 'aliases' file. This is something you have to do
though, not exim. Text lookups are perfectly valid and useful with a small
number of entries on a lightly loaded system or on a more heavily loaded
system since it may well cache the entire file if there is sufficient memory
and the system is pretty much constantly sending mail (as you can guess the
Uni's mailhub is but we use CDB due to the number of entries :-) )

John.

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John Horne, University of Plymouth, UK             Tel: +44 (0)1752 233914
E-mail: jhorne at plymouth.ac.uk
Finger for PGP key: john at jhorne.csd.plymouth.ac.uk
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