Re: [gentoo-user] Need advice in selecting a mail server

[J. Roeleveld]

On Monday 06 July 2009 23:01:13 Michael Sullivan wrote:
> I have three boxes (baby, camille, and catherine) in my LAN, and for
> some reason (this was years ago) I set up an exim server on each of
> them.  camille and catherine were supposed to forward their mail to
> baby, which has a working dovecot server.  Now, nothing from catherine
> is going through, and only mail sent from cron on camille is going
> through, and everything on baby is being delivered.  Some time a couple
> of years ago my daily logwatch reports stopped coming (all of them) and
> earlier this year my portage elogs stopped getting mailed to me.  I
> would like to replace all of them with something simple (like ssmtp),
> but I'm not sure what the setup on baby needs to be so that I can still
> access my hundreds of saved emails on the dovecot server.  Every time
> emerge on camille or catherine tries to send an elog I get the 451
> error.  I can't seem to find the attempts in the log files.  Anyway, can
> I use ssmtp on baby to receive/store network mail, or do I need
> something extra like exim/sendmail?

I believe you are maybe mixing up 2 things.
A SMTP-server accepts emails on port 25 and sends it on to another server, 
either another SMTP server or a mail-store (for instance cyrus or dovecot)

I don't think ssmtp actually listens on port 25, but only sends email to a 
SMTP server that does listen on port 25. (ports can be configured, but 25 is 
the default SMTP-port)

I actually use something similar:
ssmtp on the servers
postfix on my mail server

ssmtp is configured to pass all email to the postfix server on my mail server.
postfix is configured to either pass email on to my ISP (for outgoing email) or 
pass it to cyrus to store it on the mail server to allow my mail client to 
access it via IMAP. (POP3 is also possible, but disabled on my system)

In other words, you need  something like exim/sendmail/postfix/... on 'baby' to 
receive and store the email.
The other machines only need something like "ssmtp" to send email to 'baby'.

HTH,

Joost