Electronic mail is pretty standard with BSD. Typical mail is handled with sendmail, a highly customizable mail exchange server. It will come automatically installed so that you can send mail from the local machine, but you may need to do some tweeking for your situation. Configuring sendmail is done with the m4 utility and it will require a bit of learning on your part to get it right.

In order to use the m4 utility you must create your own .mc file. This file will specify some settings and add features to your sendmail configuration. Here are a few options from my .mc file.

divert(0)dnl
define(`ALIAS_FILE',`/etc/aliases')
define(`confCONNECTION_RATE_THROTTLE', 3)dnl
define(`confMAX_MESSAGE_SIZE', 3000000)dnl
VERSIONID(`@(#)offwhite-bsd4.4.mc 8.11 (Berkeley) 5/19/1998')
OSTYPE(bsd4.4)dnl
DOMAIN(generic)dnl
FEATURE(local_lmtp)dnl
define(`LOCAL_MAILER_FLAGS', LOCAL_MAILER_FLAGS`'P)dnl
MAILER(local)dnl
MAILER(smtp)dnl
FEATURE(use_cw_file)
FEATURE(virtusertable, hash /etc/mail/virtusertable)dnl

You can read the sendmail website for more information on the options for the .mc file. And once you have the options you want, you can run it through m4 to produce the .cf file. There is a helpful README which explains how this is done. On a FreeBSD system the .m4 files that you need to run m4 are located at /usr/share/sendmail/cf. If you copy your .mc file there you should be able to run the command that is explained in the README file.

More to come...

• Sendmail
• Qmail
• Installing Qmail (FreeBSD Diary)
• Allowing sendmail to relay mail (FreeBSD Diary)