Ability to configure external SMTP server to send DA notifications

erohas

Verified User
Joined
Aug 5, 2007
Messages
40
Location
Kazakhstan, Almaty
Hello

i think that Ability to configure external SMTP server in directadmin.conf to send DA notifications etc.
will be useful

for example

i need to disable sendmail
 
i need to disable sendmail
Your DirectAdmin server doesn't even use Sendmail. It does, however, have a link to exim which is called sendmail. If you delete the link you'll make it hard for most of your users to send email using your server. I'm not sure if DirectAdmin's services will still work, but you can try, and re-enable the link if required.

The problem with your suggestion is that if you use an external server to send mail you still need a mail server to get mail to the external server, so in that regard, user scsi is correct; you should just edit exim.conf so it won't work except for certain emails, and then only by sending them to a different server (a smarthost) for final distribution.

Jeff
 
I would like to see this too, for welcome emails anyway. Like, some of my new clients fail to get the welcome email - not sure if its their incompetence or ours, maybe because the return path is <[email protected]> different to the from address? Not sure.
 
I would like to see this too, for welcome emails anyway. Like, some of my new clients fail to get the welcome email - not sure if its their incompetence or ours, maybe because the return path is <[email protected]> different to the from address? Not sure.
Usually when users don't get welcome emails it's becaue they're using an email address at the same domain which they've just set up on your server.

Jeff
 
Usually when users don't get welcome emails it's becaue they're using an email address at the same domain which they've just set up on your server.
Irrelevant. We instruct them not to use an email associated with the domain on sign-up.

Now we say
You will receive another email when your DirectAdmin hosting account is set up. If for, whatever reason, the email fails to turn up within the hour, please contact us.
And if they do not get it, we just forward our duplicate copy via Thunderbird, which they receive without issues.
 
If an email is stuck in the queue, there would be a reason for it. The simple solution would be to determine why the email didn't leave.

As Jeff mentioned, sometimes the same domain is used, but for cases other than that, I've seen many trivial issues like non-resolving hostnames, reverse IP lookups on the server IP not working, IPs being in a blacklist, exim binaries segfaulting... etc.. Once the cause is found/fixed, then it shouldn't be an issue.

The one valid point for having DA send via smtp is this:
i need to disable sendmail
So, to accomplish that, yes, DA would need to send via smtp. DA itself does call /usr/sbin/sendmail for the case that exim was swapped for something else (I've never seen it). The catch is that DA calls /usr/sbin/sendmail as many different non-root Users (diradmin, usernames, etc).. so it can't be chowned/chmod in a specific way to make it only accessible to DA.

One simple solution for that would be if we simply add a variable for /usr/sbin/sendmail, so you can change it to something else.. like /usr/sbin/myscresetsendmail.... but will have it linked to exim. Ultimately, that wouldn't prevent it from being used, since /usr/sbin/exim still has the +suid, and your clients would only need to update their scripts to point to the new link (if they find it)

Beyond that, the solution would be for us to implement smtp in DA. I'd be very hesitant to do that though, since for the level of work involved to have DA politely learn SMTP... or just use something like a wrapper for nbsmtp, which is essentially what we'd end up re-coding.

As luck would have it, I've coded DA to have all email deliveries send through 1 function call, so whatever decision is made, we'd only need to implement it once.

Right now, my opinion is that /usr/sbin/sendmail is a requirement for DA to run... but if there is enough demand, other options like nbsmtp can be looked at.

John
 
nbsmtp relation


directadmin daemon works under nobody

that mean

i need to usermod -d /home/nobody/ nobody ?

and place /home/nobody/.nbsmtprc

am i right?
 
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