[ Thanks to Kurtz for this link.
]
“Electronic mail is still the most important user service on the
network. The Web carries a greater volume of traffic, but e-mail is
the service used for most person-to-person communication. And
person-to-person communication is the real foundation of business.
No network is complete without e-mail, and no network server
operating system is worth its salt if it doesn’t include full
TCP/IP mail support. Simple Mail Transport Protocol (SMTP) is the
TCP/IP mail transport protocol. Linux provides full SMTP support
through the sendmail program, although sendmail does more than just
send and receive SMTP mail. sendmail provides mail aliases and acts
as a ‘mail router,’ routing mail from all of the different user
mail programs to the various mail delivery programs while ensuring
that the mail is properly formatted for delivery.“This article looks at your role in configuring each of these
functions. Configuring sendmail can be a large and complex task,
but it doesn’t have to be. Compared to some network server systems
that require a second installation just to install the SMTP server
software, Linux distributions do a lot of the configuration for
you, and for most sites, the default configuration works fine. This
article will give you some information to make decisions about when
and how to change the default configuration…”