Relay email (nullmailer)

From Alpine Linux
Revision as of 13:35, 1 February 2025 by Jarp (talk | contribs)

Overview

Nullmailer is lightweight and simple MTA (mail transport agent) which allows to relay local mails to another server. This is useful if you are in example running private server at home and just want to relay notifications from cron etc. to your external mailbox via your ISPs mail server. Nullmailer allow also to rewrite envelope sender which is needed to pass spam checks many ISPs are nowadays doing.

Installation

Nullmailer can be found only from the testing branch. How to Enable the Testing Repository

# apk add nullmailer@testing

Configuration

Nullmailer is configured using individual files under /etc/nullmailer/, one file per setting.

When mail is sent to any local user i.e. "root", "logcheck", "me@localhost" etc. then mail can be sent to some external address or addresses (comma separated list) instead:

Contents of /etc/nullmailer/adminaddr

me@example.com

When nullmailer relays mail to remote server then envelope sender can be overridden as often mail gets rejected if envelope sender has non-existent domain like root@localhost.lan (note that envelope sender is not the same as From: header which nevertheless stays root@localhost.lan but that is not typically rejected):

Contents of /etc/nullmailer/allmailfrom

me@example.com


Contents of /etc/nullmailer/defaultdomain

# xxx. syslog on


Contents of /etc/nullmailer/me

# xxx. syslog on

To configure relay server to which mails are sent to add one line per remote server. Typically this would be your ISPs mail server. Optionally supports different authentication schemes:

Contents of /etc/nullmailer/remotes

smtp.example.com smtp smtpa.example.com smtp --port=2525 --user=user --pass=pass smtpa.example.com smtp --port=2525 --auth-login --user=user --pass=pass

Testing