🚀 go-pugleaf

Hello.

With the holiday season coming, I'm going to waste a few hours of my employers
time and attempt to get a 'smart' mail system going.  I am, however, VERY
confused about all this so I'm asking help from those of you that have fought
this battle before, so I don't reinvent the wheel.

Environment:  We have a group of varied machines, including Sun's, Ultrix
based Vaxen, HP's and others.  We are currently running pretty much plain
vanilla senmail, with one Sun handling our UUCP traffic and making mail
look like it all comes from there.  I have aliases set up such that mail
coming into the system gets rerouted to users at the appropriate machines.
We use YP on all the systems because of a very low number of system admin
types (me, mostly) and a large and very often changing number of hosts.

We have an Internet number assiged for us, as execu.com.  So far, management
hasn't approved the finances for a gateway, so we haven't done much else 
along that line till we convince them it's needed.  It'll happen, but the
time frame is <ahem> flexible.  So for now, we have to assume complete
dependence on dialout connections.

Goal:  I'd much like to get our mail setup running a lot smarter.  I have
a copy of smail and pathalias, and for that matter run a set of maps through
pathalias every night.  We manually try to determine paths from this output
but its not exactly a user friendly way to go about things.

I've tried to RTFM but it confuses me.  I end up with more questions at the
end than I do answers.  I keep coming back to the sendmail.cf file and after
a bit it looks like I'm going in circles.

So, is there anyone with a set of papers that you might be able to send that
would help me?  One of the biggest goals is that the nasty paths generated
by replies to usenet articles would be cleaned up and optimized a bit, but
it would also be wonderful if most of my user base could have a simpler, more
obvious method of sending mail than trying to look up the address with our
shell file and then hopefully typing it in correctly.

I'm not looking to aggressively reroute mail passing through.  Seems that
causes more problems than its worth overall.  I WOULD like to reroute the
mail that arrives here and dies because of a bad path, and I would like to
generate addresses (or restructure addresses) from mail and replies that
come from here.

I would guess that anything informative enough to help me would be fairly
long, so please e-mail to me.  I'll keep it all and would be more than willing
to pass it on should others so wish.

Thanks in advance for any and all help.

Dewey Henize
Execucom Systems Corp

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|                   execu!dewey             Dewey Henize                      |
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