It was a crazier day at The Office [1] and I wasn't even at The Office; I was working at home.
And it's official—Ihate sendmail [2], dovecot [3] and saslauth [4].
I think the pinnacle of the mess was this lovely bit of sendmail—from the configuration file /etc/mail/access on the server as installed:
# Check the /usr/share/doc/sendmail/README.cf file for a description # of the format of this file. (search for access_db in that file) # The /usr/share/doc/sendmail/README.cf is part of the sendmail-doc # package. # # by default we allow relaying from localhost... localhost.localdomain RELAY localhost RELAY 127.0.0.1 RELAY
And the format of said file from /usr/share/doc/sendmail/README.cf:
The table itself uses e-mail addresses, domain names, and network
numbers as keys. Note that IPv6 addresses must be prefaced with "IPv6:".
For example,
From:spammer@aol.com REJECT
From:cyberspammer.com REJECT
Connect:cyberspammer.com REJECT
Connect:TLD REJECT
Connect:192.168.212 REJECT
Connect:IPv6:2002:c0a8:02c7 RELAY
Connect:IPv6:2002:c0a8:51d2::23f4 REJECT
Notice anything … different … about the two?
Hmmmm?
Yeah.
XXX XXXXXX XXXXXXX piece of XXXX!
I think I got it working (the reason I think I have it working is that I have no easy way of actually testing this crap! All my email (both work and personal) is checked on the respective email servers locally, using mutt since I find it faster that way. I don't use POP (Post Office Protocol) or IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol). While POP is pretty easy to test using telnet, IMAP isn't. Toss in SMTP (Simple Mail Transport Protocol) AUTH (which goes from difficult to downright impossible to test via telnet) and I'm practically forced to use some bloated piece of XXXX like [DELETED-Lookout-DELETED] Outlook. Or Thunderbird [5], which makes me pine for the days of checking my email as 1200 baud).
(Can you tell this stuff makes me rather cranky?)
[4] http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/downloads.html#sasl