Laser ruling a draft for 3000 owners' rights
Where to Take Receipt of Mail for the 3000

Sendmail fine-tunes, if you still need delivery

By Andreas Schmidt,
with Mark Bixby, and Jens von Bülow

Relying on the HP 3000, you may want to use this box for incoming and outgoing e-mails as well. This is possible using a collection of software bundled with the HP 3000, or available in the public domain:

• Sendmail/iX, the mail transport agent well known on HP-UX that was ported to MPE/iX;

• Syslog/iX, the event logging subsystem required by Sendmail/iX;

• MAILX.HPBIN.SYS, the mail reader, and;

• Qpopper, the POP3 protocol for downloading.

Sendmail/iX and Syslog/iX have been ported to MPE. MAILX.HPBIN.SYS is part of the Posix shell part of each MPE/iX release since 4.5. The combination of all four of these utilities will enable your HP 3000 to receive Internet e-mails sent to [email protected] and send Internet e-mails into intranets.

Syslog/iX

Syslog is the standard event logging subsystem for Unix. It consists of a server daemon, a client function library, and a client command line utility. It is possible to log to files, terminal devices logged on users, or forward to other syslog systems. Syslog can accept data from the local system via an AF_UNIX socket, or from any system on the network via an AIF_INET UDP socket on port 514. The sendmail mail transport package is one of the Internet tools which log to syslog. Syslog/iX is bundled with MPE/iX in the SYSLOG account. If somebody was a little too aggressive about cleaning up unused FOS files, you can restore the SYSLOG account from the backup of your OS. Otherwise, you can locate your FOS tape and manually extract and install the SYSLOG account.

Sendmail/iX

Sendmail is a mail transport that accepts fully formatted e-mail messages from local host system users, queues the messages, and then delivers the messages to local or remote users. It listens on TCP port 25 for incoming SMTP messages from remote systems, and delivers these messages to local host system users by appending the message text to the user’s mailbox file.

Sendmail is not a mail user agent. It does not have the ability to compose or to read e-mail. To cover this functionality, HP bundled the program /SYS/HPBIN/MAILX into the shell utilities. Sendmail is also not a POP3 server that will enable network clients to access Sendmail/iX mailboxes.

MAILX.HPBIN.SYS

This program helps read and send electronic mail messages. It has no built-in facilities for sending messages to other systems. But combined with other programs (a mail routing agent and a transport agent like Sendmail/iX) it can send messages to other systems. MAILX only offers limited support for various message headers (i.e. Subject:, From:, To:, Cc:, etc). If you need to do anything fancy, like MIME headers, you’ll need to call SENDMAIL.PUB.SENDMAIL directly and pass it a fully formatted message containing all headers and body text.

To read messages from your mailbox in /usr/mail/ type :MAILX.HPBIN.SYS

To send messages use :MAILX.HPBIN.SYS [options] user1 user2 ... An :EOD finishes the message text.

The files in /usr/mail/ are named USER.ACCOUNT and are accessible only for this user.

Qpopper

Qpopper is a server that supports the POP3 protocol for downloading Internet e-mail from software clients. Qpopper does not include a message transfer agent or SMTP support but normally works with standard Unix mail transfer agents such as sendmail. On MPE/iX it works therefore perfectly with Sendmail/iX.

The installation procedure basics are:

• The link /usr/local/bin/popper must point to /SYS/ARPA/POPPER.

• In SERVICES.NET.SYS, port 110/tcp must be reserved for pop3 service.

• INETDCNF.NET.SYS must start this service via pop3 stream tcp nowait MANAGER.SYS /SYS/ARPA/POPPER popper.

• For relaying via Sendmail/iX, a file /etc/mail/relay-domains must exit in mode 644 (-rw-r—r—) owned by MGR.SENDMAIL.

Having successfully installed this, you may now change your Internet browser so that your HP 3000 is the incoming POP3 server. You may do as we did: we created a new account POP3 with plain vanilla users per mailbox. The PC e-mail client needs to be configured in the following way:

Server Name: your POP3-enabled HP 3000

Server Type: POP3 Server, User Name: USER1.POP3 (e.g., SCHMIDA.POP3)

You may want to remember to set a password and an adequate check time for new e-mail. It’s up to you whether you want to download the new messages to the PC and not to keep on the host or not.

A nice feature is the aliasing in Sendmail/iX. Your HP 3000 acts as a POP3 and SMTP server for all Internet e-mail software agents.

Is there a proper way to shut down sendmail?

• Use the Posix kill signal from SERVER.SENDMAIL or any user with SM capability. (The following can be easily turned into a job.)

kill $(head -n 1 /etc/mail/sendmail.pid)

• Only use :ABORTJOB as a last resort! (This is true for all of the Posix things that got ported to MPE)

If you don't need to run a mail server (e.g. sendmail) on your 3000, you shouldn't. In most cases, using a mail client will be "just the ticket." Point the client at your in-house (SMTP) mail server and enjoy.

 

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