Re: [Nmh-workers] Emails being tagged as spam -- NMH solution???

[Bob Carragher]

On Sun, 22 Feb 2015 13:53:41 +0000 Ralph Corderoy <address@hidden> sez:

> Hi Bob,
> 
> > Here are the (I think) relevant bits of my sendmail.mc file:
> > 
> >      FEATURE(masquerade_envelope)dnl
> >      FEATURE(`genericstable')dnl
> >      GENERICS_DOMAIN(`localhost.localdomain')dnl
> >      MAILER(`local')dnl
> >      MAILER(`smtp')dnl
> >      define(`SMART_HOST', `[smtp.comcast.net]')dnl
> >      MASQUERADE_AS(gmail.com)dnl
> 
> Stop sending outgoing mail through comcast as the smarthost;
> Gmail is the smarthost instead.  You won't persuade the rest of
> the world that you're really address@hidden unless your
> email eminates from Gmail's servers.  As well as publishing DNS
> TXT records containing SPF, Google also use DKIM.
> 
>     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sender_Policy_Framework
>     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DomainKeys_Identified_Mail
> 
> And I wouldn't have thought you'd want a Sender header giving
> another version of events either, so if that's appearing then
> find out what's adding it, e.g.  nmh, or local Sendmail because
> it doesn't trust your user to lie about the From address, and
> stop it.  This might go away if you switch away from sendmail.

You are correct:  I don't want a Sender: field showing different
versions of events.  In fact, I worked hard to try to suppress
that many years ago, but eventually gave up because I couldn't
figure out what was causing it.  That's what led me to making
sure that it always specified a domain of @localhost.localdomain.

But, as Ken pointed out in his reply, this has been stopped as of
NMH 1.5, and I was able to verify that it hasn't been generated
in my emails since I upgraded.

So, that at least is not a problem anymore.

> > Please send me details on using Exim.  If that eliminates the need for
> > Sendmail, or at least for me to directly configure it, I'm all for it!
> > I only use Sendmail to send my own outgoing emails (which always use
> > my GMail account).
> 
> Is sendmail involved with listening for incoming email to you?
> Or do you pull it down with fetchmail or similar?  If you still
> want a local SMTP server, e.g.  for programs that expect to
> pipe an email to `sendmail' to send it, then you could consider
> something simpler, intended to do just that one job, e.g.
> http://manned.org/ssmtp.8
> https://packages.qa.debian.org/s/ssmtp.html

I use fetchmail to pull down email.  So sendmail is used solely
for outgoing email.  I rarely have need to send (myself) local
email, so all of it is intended to leave my computer.

I know that using sendmail is very much overkill for my needs.
On the other hand, if it's just a matter of a couple of
adjustments in my existing sendmail.mc file, then I'd normally
prefer that over trying something new simply because email
doesn't come with true verification of delivery.  (If the
recipient doesn't reply in a way that lets you conclude the
message was received, then you must play the "Did you receive
it?" game.)

> > but I don't know how to set that up with sendmail.  Would this be a
> > good reference (for TLS)?
> > 
> >      http://www.sendmail.org/~ca/email/starttls.html
> 
> I'd be surprised if it's that much work, but then this is
> sendmail.  :-) Perhaps it's doing all that because it's
> interested in receiving emails too, which you're not bothered
> with.

Entirely possible.  I'll be very happy if I don't need to do
"that much work!"  B-)

> If you only need nmh email to go out through Gmail, and all
> other local emails to just stay locally, then your ideal might
> be to have nmh send directly to Gmail with no other local
> program involved, and I think it can do that these days;  see
> the send(1) options Ken suggested.

I tried that and succeeded!!!  There are still some things that
need to be set up, but at least the proof-of-concept succeeded.
If I can completely eliminate sendmail, I'll be very grateful to
you for also pushing me to use send(1)!  B-)

                                Bob