My mail server of choice is Postfix. I’ve been using it since 1992. It is what I install on all my servers. But that is going go change today.
I just installed nullmailer on my DHCP server.
When your machine just sends outgoing email, just as notices, you don’t need a full blown MTA. Something like nullmailer should suffice.
The system I’m working on is a FreeBSD jail running FreeBSD 9.1-RELEASE-p4.
I’m about to find out. It’s small. You can add SSL support, but I’m not. Maintaining it should be a breeze. With few dependencies, there’s less chance of an upgrade being required because of a vulnerability in something else.
After installing, I redefined redefine mailq and sendmail by having only this in /etc/mail/mailer.conf:
sendmail /usr/local/libexec/nullmailer/sendmail send-mail /usr/local/libexec/nullmailer/sendmail mailq /usr/local/libexec/nullmailer/mailq
Next, I created /usr/local/etc/nullmailer/remotes to contain this:
cliff.example.org smtp --port=25
That points to my smart mail host, which will take care of the delivery.
The server hostname must appear in /usr/local/etc/nullmailer/me and /usr/local/etc/nullmailer/me.sample usually contains the right example. Mine contains:
toiler.example.org
You need to enable nullmailer with this entry in /etc/rc.conf:
nullmailer_enable="YES"
Then I started nullmailer:
# service nullmailer start Starting nullmailer. # ps auwx | grep nullmailer nullmail 48374 0.0 0.0 14504 1864 ?? IsJ 12:09PM 0:00.00 /bin/sh -c /usr/local/sbin/nullmailer-send | /usr/bin/logger -i -p mail.info -t nullmailer nullmail 48375 0.0 0.0 19616 2252 ?? IJ 12:09PM 0:00.00 /usr/local/sbin/nullmailer-send nullmail 48376 0.0 0.0 9912 1372 ?? IJ 12:09PM 0:00.00 /usr/bin/logger -i -p mail.info -t nullmailer root 49581 0.0 0.0 10228 1532 3 R+J 12:10PM 0:00.00 grep nullmailer
Let’s send a test message:
echo test | mail dan@example.org
Checking the mail logs:
Oct 16 12:14:16 toiler nullmailer[48376]: Trigger pulled. Oct 16 12:14:16 toiler nullmailer[48376]: Rescanning queue. Oct 16 12:14:16 toiler nullmailer[48376]: Starting delivery, 1 message(s) in queue. Oct 16 12:14:16 toiler nullmailer[48376]: Starting delivery: protocol: smtp host: cliff.example.org file: 1381925656.51602 Oct 16 12:14:16 toiler nullmailer[48376]: Sent file. Oct 16 12:14:16 toiler nullmailer[48376]: Delivery complete, 0 message(s) remain.
Based on the above, here is my newly created /usr/local/etc/logcheck/ignore.d.server/local-nullmailer file:
^\w{3} [ :[:digit:]]{11} [._[:alnum:]-]+ nullmailer\[[[:digit:]]+\]: Trigger pulled.
^\w{3} [ :[:digit:]]{11} [._[:alnum:]-]+ nullmailer\[[[:digit:]]+\]: Rescanning queue.
^\w{3} [ :[:digit:]]{11} [._[:alnum:]-]+ nullmailer\[[[:digit:]]+\]: Starting delivery, [[:digit:]]+ message\(s\) in queue.
^\w{3} [ :[:digit:]]{11} [._[:alnum:]-]+ nullmailer\[[[:digit:]]+\]: Starting delivery: protocol: smtp host: cliff.example.org file: [[:digit:]]+.[[:digit:]]+
^\w{3} [ :[:digit:]]{11} [._[:alnum:]-]+ nullmailer\[[[:digit:]]+\]: Sent file.
^\w{3} [ :[:digit:]]{11} [._[:alnum:]-]+ nullmailer\[[[:digit:]]+\]: Delivery complete, 0 message\(s\) remain.
You may want to use something other than cliff.example.org as shown in the 4th line.
