SMTP Auth

Hi, Just wondered if anyone has some simple saslauthd config suggestions that would enable SMTP Authentication. I am using Sendmail for SMTP and Dovcot for POP3 on Fedora 6 and can not get SMTP Authentication working despite a million and one searches. Any help would be great. BRGDS Johan

Hi,

Asking for trouble I'm afraid - if you want a maintainable system, don't use Sendmail.

Sendmail (once upon a time) use to be "the" mail system for Linux (and indeed Unix in general) however it's based on really nasty M4 config files and even today with lots of nice helper tools it's almost impossible to run and maintain properly. (unless you're an out and out Guru)

[I ran an ISP using sendmail for many years - trust me!]

I've not used Dovecot, however looking at the docs they do support Postfix and they support authentication using postfix. (directly) [I would be recommending Postfix anyway!]

So the answer to your question is, scrap sendmail, install postfix, and most of your problems will go away.

Points of reference;

The 2 x current "big" mail servers with open source options are Scalix and Zimbra. Zimbra uses postfix anyway. Scalix comes with sendmail, however this typically does not work properly and anyone with any sense converts it to postfix fairly rapidly. According to the forums Scalix are moving to Postfix with their next major release.

Not seen any responses to the "so why did you use sendmail anyway" question as yet ...

Incidentally ... why use Dovecot ??

See; http://www.zimbra.com

Hi Thanks for that. I will look at Zimbra, sounds interesting. I have worked with Sendmail for some time now and am used to the notorious M4 Config file but I do not beleive that this is the answer to the SMTP authentication issue. I agree with your opinions of Sendmail, infact we have migrated all our Sendmail boxes to Exim for similar reasons. In all honesty I work day in day out with Microsoft Exchange 2003 and more and more with 2007 which is a great product. You would love it because you do not need to use the GUI as it has cmdlets for Windows Power Shell. I use Dovcot because it is a POP3 Server which is bundled with Fedora Linux. I do not take huge amounts of email on my Server so it works for me.

Urm, I wouldn't love it as I wouldn't be able to pay for it .. and I don't know what a "Windows Power Shell" is ..

Regardless of your M4 abilities, the "easy" answer would be to use Postfix as this is documented to work smoothly.

(Postfix was developed [essentially] by IBM as a clean re-write from scratch and .. it is *very* clean - we run all our configs dynamically from MySQL)