[KLUG Members] using sendmail to block spam

[Adam Williams]

>>>Please take heed of what this guy does for a living, he's a full-time
>>>network admin at a supercomputing center...note that he is incorporating
>>>stuff from YEARS of experience; he may be more experienced...unless a
>>>certain Mr. Allman is a subscriber).
>>>I would not touch this with a ten foot pole ....
>>Same here.  Anyone tries to touch the source of my sendmail is going to
>>get cracked upside the head with the nearest piece of office furniture
>>and get their body dumped into the storm sewer.
>Adam!
>1. Don't hold back on your feelings on this topic, please! We want to
>   know how you REALLY feel! :)

Ok.

>2. Admittedly, he's not touching source. What he is doing is patching
>   up .m4 files a LOT more deeply than merely adding or modifying a few
>   fairly simple declaritive macros in sendmail.mc

Whether he is touching true "source" or not, this really seems a brute
force way to go about it that could easily have unintended
consequences.  m4 is a macro language,  one can include other m4 files,
etc... Adding feature declarations and such is possible without
modifying the core package.  There are lots of rules about for
filtering, chunking headers, etc...  He may claim sendmail as an
occupation but I just can't believe this is the optimal or most elegant
solution to go about addressing this problem, it seem downright
dangerous.  

And 8.12.x fixes many problems, adds new features,  to bother with a
hacked (to whatever degree) 8.11.x version.  Of course, if could be that
many of his changes are actually in 8.12.x by default.

>>>I have configured sendmail to run a number of e-mail servers and have from 
>>>time to time incorporated fragments of of m4 code in .mc files, then rebuilt
>>>with:
>>>m4 whatevername.mc > sendmail.cf, 
>>If setting up your sendmail is any harder than that,  go back to "Go",
>>and start over.
>My problems have mostly been difficulty with understanding how particular 
>features interact, and in figuring out whether my sense of "local" or "remote"
>matches the documentation. Other than that, I make the usual mistakes any M4
>novice might have made.

Right, 8.12.x helps quite a bit with the vague local/remote distinction;
which even after years admin-ing sendmail still seems hard to define.

The documentation is pretty bad.  And the example sample configs could
use a great deal of updating and additional comments.