UUCP Setup

To use smail in a UUCP-only environment, the basic installation is rather simple. First, you must make sure you have the two symbolic links to rmail and sendmail mentioned above. If you expect to receive SMTP batches from other sites, you also have to make rsmtp a link to smail.

In Vince Skahan's smail distribution, you will find a sample configuration file. It is named config.sample and resides in /usr/lib/smail. You have to copy it to config and edit it to reflect values specific to your site.

Assume your site is named swim.twobirds.com, and is registered in the UUCP maps as swim. Your smarthost is ulysses. Then your config file should look like this:

           #
           # Our domain names
           visible domain=two.birds:uucp
           #
           # Our name on outgoing mails
           visible name=swim.twobirds.com
           #
           # Use this as uucp-name as well
           uucp name=swim.twobirds.com
           #
           # Our smarthost
           smart host=ulysses

The first statement tells smail about the domains your site belongs to. Insert their names here, separated by colons. If your site name is registered in the UUCP maps, you should also add uucp. When being handed a mail message, smail determines your host's name using the hostname(2) system call, and checks the recipient's address against this hostname, tacking on all names from this list in turn. If the address matches any of these names, or the unqualified hostname, the recipient is considered local, and smail attempts to deliver the message to a user or alias on the local host. Otherwise, the recipient is considered remote, and delivery to the destination host is attempted.

visible_name should contain a single, fully qualified domain name of your site that you want to use on outgoing mails. This name is used when generating the sender's address on all outgoing mail. You must make sure to use a name that smail recognizes as referring to the local host (i.e. the hostname with one of the domains listed in the visible_domain attribute). Otherwise, replies to your mails will bounce off your site.

The last statement sets the path used for smart-host routing (described in section-). With this sample setup, smail will forward any mail for remote addresses to the smart host. The path specified in the smart_path attribute will be used as a route to the smart host. Since messages will be delivered via UUCP, the attribute must specify a system known to your UUCP software. Please refer to chapter- on making a site known to UUCP.

There's one option used in the above file that we haven't explained yet; this is uucp_name. The reason to use the option is this: By default, smail uses the value returned by hostname(2) for UUCP-specific things such as the return path given in the From_ header line. If your hostname is not registered with the UUCP mapping project, you should tell smail to use your fully qualified domain name instead. This can be done by adding the uucp_name option to the config file.

There is another file in /usr/lib/smail, called paths.sample. It is an example of what a paths file might look like. However, you will not need one unless you have mail links to more than one site. If you do, however, you will have to write one yourself, or generate one from the Usenet maps. The paths file will be described later in this chapter.