[Mimedefang] InpuMailFilter requires milter support

[Kris Deugau]

Nicholas Kirlew wrote:
> I am one of those newbie lost souls wandering around with redhat 9 issue of
> sendmail upgraded to 10.12.8 and a milter that don't.

I'm assuming you mean "sendmail 8.12.10 compiled from source", not the
RedHat-provided sendmail packages (which include milter support out of
the box).

As long as you install the current errata package
(sendmail-8.12.8-9.90.{arch}.rpm for RH9) you've got a sendmail with no
known security holes.

> I have spent a few days on it and over the last 8 hours arrive back
> at the same point: The /var/log/messages advises that:
> Milter requires Milter support (-DMILTER). and others related.
> 
> I think I know this means that sendmail does not have the correct
> support aka site.config.m4

Correct;  assuming you're building sendmail from source.

Not sure about the rest of your notes;  I've always just used the
provided RPMs instead of spending hours and hours wandering through
sendmail build-time configuration options.  In particular, the RedHat
packages include a segment in the .mc file that references the required
m4 macro expansions in the provided location, so that
"m4 /etc/mail/sendmail.mc > /etc/mail/sendmail.cf" will cleanly and
properly generate the sendmail config file.

> 3) I have done the 50 page Mickey Hill Howto a few times and I have
> start and stop nested inside the init.d/sendmail so I think they are
> up and running. What the Howto does not refer to and I have seen
> elsewhere is that the mail has to be sent to the milter first and
> then onto the sendmail spool, the idea seems to be that mail hits
> milter, gets done over and then hits MTA, and that I need to set that
> up.

Er, not exactly.  A milter program plugs into sendmail's processing at
several stages- it can influence whether a connection is rejected right
away;  whether the HELO argument is to be accepted, whether to accept
the sender address, and whether to accept the recipient address(es). 
Then it can do processing on the message body once those have been
accepted, and decide whether to reject, discard, mangle, or pass through
the message.

sendmail still handles talking to the "outside world" (accepting inbound
SMTP connections;  sending mail via SMTP to other systems;  delivering
mail via one of the defined delivery agents), but it allows one or more
milter programs to influence processing as above.

-kgd
-- 
<erno> hm. I've lost a machine.. literally _lost_. it responds to
ping, it works completely, I just can't figure out where in my
apartment it is.