Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!bpa!cbmvax!vu-vlsi!dsinc!lgnp1!vskahan
From: vskahan@lgnp1.LS.COM (Vince Skahan)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo
Subject: Re:  mail
Message-ID: <1570@lgnp1.LS.COM>
Date: 5 Jun 89 00:28:55 GMT
References: <8906021616.AA02345@richter.mit.edu>
Reply-To: vince@bcsaic.UUCP (Vince Skahan)
Organization: Boeing Computer Services - Phila.
Lines: 43

In article <8906021616.AA02345@richter.mit.edu> krowitz@RICHTER.MIT.EDU (David Krowitz) writes:
>The sendmail.cf file is, as you said, formidable.
>There are very few people who can understand the cryptic
>format of the file. Most of us (myself included) use
>an existing file we borrowed from someone else and then
>modified for our particular site.
>

Same goes with us.  I took a look at the (in my opinion quite weak)
examples in arpaproto.cf and uucpproto.cf, put the two together and got
something that was relatively stupid for both UUCP and TCP.

sendmail.cf writing is a royal pain and is very, very tricky and is
something you cannot just pick up and do in 15 minutes unless you're
starting with a pretty close-to-the target version that you need to edit
slightly.

If you have an ultrix system, the sendmail.cf you get by default is
REALLY good in comparison to any default ones I've ever seen.  It's
pretty close to plug-and-play.

It has a real nice feature where you can define lots of gateways for
UUCP, and especially (for me) decnet where all mail to a particular fake
domain gets forwarded via TCP to the remote gateway host which sends it
along.

In other words, if you want to mail to a remote Decnet-only Vax from an
Apollo that talks only TCP, you mail to remotevax::user (like in VMS)
and it is rewritten into user%remotevax.dnet@decnetgatewayvax

When it gets to the "decnetgatewayvax", the mail gets sent to
remotevax::user like you really wanted to.

I run the ultrix one on all systems and have added the SR10 mailers for
DPSS<--->unix mail with no problems.  The only thing I can't make it do
is handle the case of mailing from DPSS to a *remote* unix mail site
(which I think is lack of a feature...it works just fine between *local*
DPSS and unix mail).
-- 
Vince Skahan - please reply to skahan@boeing.com or bcsaic!psev!bcs212

Note: any comments expressed above are mine and have no relation to
Boeing or the real nice folks who let me read news on their system...