Mail configuration

[Dave Miller]

I've been working the last couple days on getting bug-buddy and 
reportbug to work with our Bugzilla, and ran into an interesting 
situation.  Both of them submit the bug report via email, and Warty's 
email system is not configured well enough to be able to send mail out 
of the box from probably 80% of the households in the US (and possibly 
elsewhere, but I'm only familiar with around here ;)

There are two problems with the default mail configuration, both of 
which are a direct result of most ISPs attempts to deal with spammers.

The main problem is that a majority of the ISPs in the US (at least for 
household broadband and dialup connections) block outgoing port 25 
unless it's going to the ISP's own SMTP server.

The second is that most of them also reject mail that originates at a 
domain that they can't look up in DNS.

I always have to do 2 things to the postfix config before I can send 
mail from a warty box:  1) edit /etc/mailname to contain a domain name 
that exists outside of my LAN, and 2) edit /etc/postfix/main.cf and 
change relayhost to point at my ISP's SMTP server.

Both reportbug and bug-buddy offer the user the opportunity to set the 
From: address for the email to be sent.  However, when the email gets 
submitted to /usr/sbin/sendmail, postfix (and sendmail for that matter) 
will happily use <accountname@(contents of /etc/mailname)> as the MAIL 
FROM when submitting it to the next hop SMTP server.

I hate to suggest adding yet another question to the base installation, 
but I'm thinking if we want bug reports to "just work" that we should 
probably assume everyone is going to need to pick an SMTP server to use 
for relayhost.  And of course, setting an /etc/mailname that actually 
exists on the Internet...

Long term we probably need to make it use HTTP instead of sending a 
mail, but I don't think that can be accomplished between now and release 
time.

Anyone have any bright ideas?

-- 
  - justdave