SUMMARY: email without sendmail

Thanks to all who replied!  I was quite impressed with the creativity of
some of the responses.  For anyone who is interested, here is a summary of
the suggested solutions:

Most were "just don't run it as a daemon and you'll be fine"

New sendmail 8.12.2 is different - new message  submission agent smmsp and
sendmail now runs as sgid not suid the killer

Map port 25 to a service that just closes the connection using inetd (such
as setting the program to execute to /bin/false or whatever).  Then use use
sendmail on the command line as a mail client - there is no need to run it
as a daemon.

If you have an aversion to the behemoth, build and install Postfix[1] (or
Exim or Qmail, according to taste).

If you are using stock Sun provided sendmail (at least with Solaris 7/8) all
you need to do is: vi /etc/default/sendmail and add the following lines:
	MODE=""
	QUEUEINTERVAL="8h"
The first tells the system to run sendmail in a mode where it will not
listen for incoming connections, the second tells it how often to process
the queue.  This is useful in case your next hop in the mail relay chain is
down and the initial attempt at sending the message fails.  I find 8 hours
is reasonable.

I would write a little script to telnet to port 25 of your central SMTP
server and do the standard SMTP commands. Something
like:
	HELO machine.domain.com
	RCPT TO:<admins@domain.com>
	MAIL FROM:<root@machine.domain.com>
	DATA
	Subject: INFO: machine: disk x 90% full
	blah blah
	.


----- Original Message -----
From: "Olson, John C"
To: <sunmanagers@sunmanagers.org>
Sent: Monday, March 11, 2002 4:08 PM
Subject: email without sendmail

> Hello,
>
> Probably a silly question but I'll ask it anyways.
>
> I typically don't install sendmail on my servers as it poses a security
> risk.  However, some of the sysadmin's here would like to be able to send
> emails from scripts for alerting and such.  The mailx and mail
sub-programs
> seem to depend on installation of sendmail.  Is there a client
(non-server)
> out there, preferably Sun-provided, that I am not aware of?
>
> > Thanks,
> > John
> _______________________________________________
> sunmanagers mailing list
> sunmanagers@sunmanagers.org
> http://www.sunmanagers.org/mailman/listinfo/sunmanagers
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