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<p><span>Hi Michael</span></p>
<p><span>Thanks for the reply.</span></p>
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<p style="padding-left: 40px;"><span> >Hi Neil,</span><br /><br /></p>
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<blockquote style="padding-left: 120px;">My mail gets relayed via a 3rd party who insists on connections via port 587 - which the GUI doesn't seem to accept in the Smart Relay Server field. I'd put it in manually to make it work in sendmail.mc...</blockquote>
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<p dir="ltr" style="padding-left: 40px;"><br /><span>Port 587 gets opened and bound by the MTA (Sendmail *or* Postfix) when the checkbox "Enable Submission Port" is ticked in "Network Services" / "Email" in the "Basic" Tab.</span><br /><br /><span></span></p>
<p dir="ltr" style="padding-left: 40px;"><span>For "Smart Relay Server" see the same GUI page in the "Advanced" Tab. That's where you can set this.</span><br /><br /><span>In fact pretty much every aspect of the Email related GUI works for both Sendmail and Postfix.</span><br /><br /><span>The GUI writes the changes to the Sendmail configuration files (even if Postfix is the MTA) and restarts whatever MTA is enabled. Whenever Postfix is restarted, it will parse the Sendmail configuration and an will dynamically write out an updated Postfix configuration.</span><br /><br /><span>Therefore manual edits to the Postfix configuration should only be done for options that the GUI does not change.</span><br /><br /></p>
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<p><span>Its not incoming mail to my server that has to be on port 587, its the outbound connection to the Smart Relay . (https://www.linuxbabe.com/mail-server/postfix-smtp-relay-ubuntu-sendinblue explains it - and what Postfix needs to look like to handle it.)</span></p>
<p>For sendmail.mc, to get relaying working I put:</p>
<p style="padding-left: 40px;">define(`SMART_HOST', smtp-relay.sendinblue.com')dnl</p>
<p style="padding-left: 40px;">define(`RELAY_MAILER, `esmtp')dnl</p>
<p style="padding-left: 40px;">define(`RELAY_MAILER_ARGS, `TCP $h 587')dnl</p>
<p>where the RELAY_MAILER_ARGS argument identifies which port to communicate with the relay with (outgoing!). (I'm not 100% that the middle line is necessary...)</p>
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<div>For Postfix, its a bit simpler:</div>
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<pre style="padding-left: 40px;">relayhost = [smtp-relay.sendinblue.com]:587<br /><br /></pre>
<p>I wonder if there might be scope for the GUI accepting a port number as it doesn't accept one at present (maybe something like "smtp-relay.sendinblue.com:587") and generating the appropriate lines/syntax in the sendmail configuration if a port number is present and then finding it when scanning to generate the postscript configuration?</p>
<p>You might be wondering why I'm using a mail marketing company to relay my email: its a simple matter of "reputation" - some mail systems won't accept (or treat as SPAM) all mail that comes from a "non-business" network connection and I was getting problems with sending email direct!</p>
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<p>However, when sendmail.mc gets parsed, the port (in RELAY_MAILER_ARGS) doesn't get picked up, so postfix tries to use port 25 - and the relay won't accept the authenticated connection! Editing mail.cf manually (or via Webmin) to set the relayhost enabled it to work - until the file gets regenerated automatically.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 40px;"><br /><span>If you don't want the MTA to use port 25, then you can simply untick the checkbox "Enable SMTP Server". It will still use port 465 and 587 if "Enable SMTPS Server" and "Enable Submission Port" are enabled.</span><br /><br /></p>
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<blockquote style="padding-left: 40px;">The other thing that's a bit of a pain is that it seems /etc/procmailrc gets regenerated when I make the switch...</blockquote>
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<p dir="ltr" style="padding-left: 40px;"><br /><span>I'm not going to touch that, as /etc/procmailrc is a file on BlueOnyx that's entirely "owned" by the GUI. If you want to prevent the GUI from messing with a custom /etc/procmailrc, then you can use this command to prevent even user "root" from making changes to it:</span><br /><br /><span>chattr +i /etc/procmailrc</span><br /><br /><span>If you want to "unlock" it again, use:</span><br /><br /><span>chattr -i /etc/procmailrc</span><br /><br /><br /></p>
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<p><span>That's fair enough - I just keep a copy of what I want procmailrc to look like and copy it back - if it annoys me enough I'll write a simple cron to check it for change and restore it :)</span></p>
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<p>There are other utilities (like the sendmail command) that seem to be able to "soft link" in /etc/alternatives/mta* to either a version for .sendmail or .postfix. What switches these links - as the GUI change doesn't seem to have done it. Do I have to do it manually?</p>
<p style="padding-left: 40px;"><br /><span>No, we don't touch these at all. When you switch the MTA in the GUI, we simply run "systemctl disable <service>" and "systemctl enable <service>" on Sendmail and Postfix. There is also a config file called /etc/sysconfig/bxmta which gets updated and tells the GUI which MTA is active. That file either has ...</span><br /><br /><span>MTA=POSTFIX</span><br /><br /><span>... or ...</span><br /><br /><span>MTA=SENDMAIL</span><br /><br /><span>... in it.</span></p>
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<p><span>Again, fair enough - I was just checking that there wasn't something else that needed to be run. I will probably write a simple script to swap the links over</span></p>
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<p><span>Thanks</span></p>
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<p><span>Neil.</span></p>
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