Deployment:Linux:MTA:Sendmail

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Setting up Sendmail with PLAINTEXT auth against a smarthost

The Problem

I have a Rogers @HOME connection and wanted to setup sendmail to act as a client but rogers requries plaintext auth, and these MTAs refuse to do plaintext without a secure connection (which is the way it should be!!!!!)

Part 1 - The Smarthost part (fairly straight forward)

define(`SMART_HOST',`smtp.broadband.rogers.com')

Part 2 - The Auth Part

Google it and you'll see stuff like:

How to use the sendmail authinfo:

(in sendmail.mc)

    FEATURE(`authinfo', `hash /etc/mail/auth/client-info')

    Also, not sure whether this is necessary, it may be
    define(`confAUTH_OPTIONS', `c ')dnl

(in /etc/mail/auth/client-info)

    AuthInfo:smtp.broadband.rogers.com "U:email@rogers.com" "P:mysecretpassword" "M:LOGIN PLAIN"
 
    The M:LOGIN PLAIN part is very important

• So, you're suppose to edit sendmail.mc and then generate the sendmail.cf you do that with these commands

Backup sendmail.cf before you start
cp /etc/mail/sendmail.cf /etc/mail/sendmail_before_messing_around.old
m4 /etc/mail/sendmail.mc > /etc/mail/sendmail.cf

• If you stop there with authinfo it won't work, you got the generate a .db file as follows (i don't exactly know what that does)

$ makemap hash client-info < client-info
$ chmod 600 client-info client-info.db
$ service sendmail restart #This only works for Redhat based linux.  Other flavors try typing: /etc/init.d/sendmail restart
$ # If you have stuff stuck in you queue (ie, type mailq) then you can process it with this
$ /usr/lib/sendmail -v -q

• If things don't work, check your maillog (/var/log/maillog) to see the exact error.