Re: badmailfrom questions...

[Scott Schwartz <schwartz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

"D. J. Bernstein" <djb@xxxxxxxx> writes:
| dare@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx writes:
| > I don't want to use rcpthosts because it won't let me send mail outside.
| 
| Did it occur to you to read the FAQ? Was it not clear that FAQ 5.4
| applied to your situation? How could it have been made more clear?

Don't you wonder why this question comes up again and again and again?
The reason is that your user interface is badly engineered.

Fortunately, it is easy to fix:  Give qmail a new, well documented,
control file named "allowed2relay".  That eliminates 90% of the
confusion you see on this topic.  (Notice that you could *implement*
this with tcpserver and RELAYCLIENT, but that's uninteresting; the
point is that the user interface has to address the interesting
problem, not provide tweaks on low level protocol stuff.)  Then, to
cover the other 10%, change qmail-smtpd so that a nonexistent rcpthosts
file means "the stuff in locals and virtualdomains".  It's imperative
to provide sensible defaults for this.  99% of the time one nice config
file will do the job well, where currently several config files do the
job poorly.

Given your current design, tcpserver is a de-facto integral part of a
correctly configured qmail system.  You need to say that at the very
top of INSTALL ("0. fetch and install tcpserver"), and all the
installation instructions must include the setting up of the tcp rules
file.  The current instructions, which treat tcpserver and RELAYCLIENT
as an optional extra, are at odds with normal practice, a fact which is
not obvious to newbies.