Whitelist-Blacklist question + one more

[Kevin Miller]

Steve Campbell wrote:
 
> I think you understand me, Kevin. Thanks for the clarity I never seem
> to be able to convey. My setup now is that I have two servers: one
> hosts one domain and the other hosts two other domains. Both servers
> are the mail store for their respective domains. Both servers are the
> secondary MX for the domains that they do not contain the mail stores
> for. I'm not sure this works all that well, but it does work. Both
> primary servers are the smtp, imap and pop servers for their
> respective domains, along with running MS on both.       
> 
> I'm thinking of making these new whiz-bang servers I'm about to get
> to function in different ways. One could be the mail store for all
> three domains and the other could be the smtp and MX for all three
> domains running MS.   
> 
> I was debating whether to use the mailertable, which would be simple
> with only three domains, or use SMARTHOST but I wasn't sure I could
> use it for three domains. I also wasn't sure whether SMARTHOST would
> be used before the first instance or between the two instances for
> delivery (hence my question).    
> 
> I'm not even sure it'd be a smart move to change the way I'm doing it
> since there'd be a lot of CPU cycles not used on the mail store since
> it'd only be used for pop and imap. But as the primary MX the way
> it's now set up on such low powered CPUs, they get bogged down
> whenever a mailing list dumps a lot of email to them.    
> 
> Thanks again Kevin,

What I have are internal hosts that cannot be reached from the outside (Exchange servers).  I also have three MailScanner mx gateways that sit on the edge of the network.  These do all the spam/virus filtering, then send to the a particular internal machine, depending on what domain it is associated with.  Works pretty well.  Your setup doesn't sound unreasonable to me though (but I'm not a 'guru').  What you're thinking of rolling to sounds pretty similar to what I have.  

IIRC, the SMARTHOST feature forwards all mail to some other host.  For instance, my exchange server points to a smarthost for all outbound mail.  It isn't domain specific though.  I think mailertable is the easiest way to deal with multiple domains.  No additional tweaking is needed between the two MS sendmail instances - all inbound hits mailqueue.in and all vetted mail lands in mqueue where it's routed by sendmail appropriately.

Best...

...Kevin
-- 
Kevin Miller                Registered Linux User No: 307357
CBJ MIS Dept.               Network Systems Admin., Mail Admin.
155 South Seward Street     ph: (907) 586-0242
Juneau, Alaska 99801        fax: (907 586-4500