This is a draft, it isn't finished at all!
This guide gives some very rough hints about the things to do when you setup e-mail for a small domain or a single computer. It is not intended as a full blown description, but just as a collection of hints, of DOs and DON'Ts. The MTA I will describe is sendmail (the current version can be found at ftp.sendmail.org .) There are others available too, but I'm used to sendmail and I recommend it. Please send comments/suggestions to me.
MY.DOM.AIN.The mailhost in this domain is
MAIL.MY.DOM.AIN.You have a direct connection to the Internet, your system is (most of the time) online.
MY.DOM.AIN. IN MX 10 MAIL.MY.DOM.AIN.Now every e-mail to
USER@MY.DOM.AINis delivered to
Please use an MX record, even if you have an A record for
There is a simple reason for this:
All MTAs (should) use the MX record to deliver e-mail.
If you don't have one, they will ask the DNS for it anyway.
So each time an e-mail will be delivered to your domain,
a request for the MX record will be made.
If there is one, it is at least a chance that it has been cached,
so no need to contact your DNS server for each e-mail.
If there is none, this will unnecessary increase internet traffic
and slow down the delivery of your e-mail.
This is also explained in the book
Don't let your MX record point to a CNAME!
This is a violation of
and most likely it will break some things.
Note that the algorithm to delete irrelevant RRs breaks if LOCAL has
a alias and the alias is listed in the MX records for REMOTE. (E.g.
REMOTE has an MX of ALIAS, where ALIAS has a CNAME of LOCAL). This
can be avoided if aliases are never used in the data section of MX
This is also explained in the book "Sendmail" pg. 213f.
RFC 974 explains how e-mail is delivered, i.e., how to use MX records, etc.
sendmail.cfor create it from a .mc file in
SENDMAIL/cf/cf.The README in SENDMAIL/cf explains very well what you need to know for special cases. The simplest way to get a working configuration is to use one of the examples and adopt it to your needs. I won't explain any special stuff here, but a simple setup (as given in the assumptions above ). Choose one of the example files named
OSmatches the operating system of your mailhost. We'll take SunOS 4.1.x for this guide, so the file is
cs-sunos4.1.mcThe important lines are:
VERSIONID(`@(#)cs-sunos4.1.mc 8.3 (Berkeley) 8/6/95') OSTYPE(sunos4.1)dnl DOMAIN(CS.Berkeley.EDU)dnl MAILER(local)dnl MAILER(smtp)dnlTheoretically you just have to change this to:
VERSIONID(`@(#)cs-sunos4.1.mc 8.3 (MY.DOM.AIN) 04/21/96') MASQUERADE_AS(MY.DOM.AIN) OSTYPE(sunos4.1)dnl MAILER(local)dnl MAILER(smtp)dnlAnd there you go... (use
m4 my-dom-ain.mc > sendmail.cfto generate the sendmail.cf file). Now you need to add all names for which your host should receive e-mail to the class w, e.g.,
If this doesn't fulfill your needs, you need to read a little bit more.