On Thu, Jun 15, 2006 at 04:41:13PM +1000, Daniel Carosone wrote:
>   There will be need for
> several different stories to be told (migration to postfix, migration
> to pkgsrc sendmail, migration to some-other-MTA-entirely).

Ok, let me start with a very simple case: on the machines where I still
used sendmail, I had a special setup: no main sendmail daemon running,
but submission queue got forwarded directly to the main on site mail server.

In sendmail terms: I used FEATURE(`msp', `[local.mail.server.ip]')dnl
for generating /etc/mail/submit.cf.

This setup maybe not very common, but it could be used for a lot of users
that just forward their mail to their ISPs mail server.

I thought about doing something similar with the in-tree postfix, but it looked
too heavy weight or hackish to me. I chose to replace it with mini_sendmail
from pkgsrc. Installation is realy simple, the pkg is extremly small and
compiled in a very short time, even on a slow embedded mips board. The 
installation is completely documented in the MESSAGE of the pkg, and it is
just:

  - cp /usr/pkg/share/examples/mini_sendmail/mailer.conf /etc
  - vi /etc/mailer.conf and replace "relayhost" with the mail server you
    want to forward to.
  - add check_mailq=NO to /etc/daily.conf (there is no mailq, so you do not
    want to check it)

The downside of this aproach (with in my case actually is a feature): 
mini_sendmail does not queue, not at all. If the relayhost is not available,
mail submission will just fail.

I also added sendmail=NO and postfix=NO to /etc/rc.conf - but IMHO that should
not be necessary; we should change /etc/rc.d/postfix to check /etc/mailer.conf
and default postfix to NO if mailer.conf does not look as expected.


Martin