Glenn,

You could use one of the 'stand alone' SMTP mailers (JTMAIL or MAILNM),
point to your networks DNS server and send your mail through another host
that is running Sendmail.   That is the setup that we had used for over 2
years.

I decided to install Sendmail and Syslog on our HP3K to address the problem
of  'undeliverable' e-mail messages and acknowledgements thrashing through
our network, destined for our HP3K but with no way of getting there.
Programmers would use the SMTP mailers without specifying a valid return
address and the mailers, by default, would use the MPE user name (i.e.
manager.sys@hp3khost..) as the from address,  the recipients would, at
times, use 'reply all' and thus a copy of the message would be sent back to
our host without a way of being received.  It would stay in the network for
days causing the 'postmaster' to intervene.  His constant complaints were
the reason for installing Sendmail and Syslog.

In our environment we have reserved a time slot in the early morning for
backups.  Our backup job terminates (in some cases gracefully in some cases
not) all of the 'system' jobs (including Sendmail and Syslog), it aborts
any sessions, suspends any user batch jobs, performs any needed 'cleanup',
performs the backup, starts up the system jobs and 'resumes' any suspended
user jobs.

The 'cleanup' for Sendmail and Syslog is comprised of the following:
!CONTINUE
!purge /tmp/mail.log
!CONTINUE
!purge /tmp/syslog.log

The above files would be 'rebuilt' by Sendmail and Syslog.  Now any
'returned' mail would be found under the directory:
     /usr/mail/
and one could use the 'mailx.hpbin' utility to view it.

Regards
Paul Christidis



Earlier, I wrote:

> I got email working from the 3000 (5.5pp4, IIRC) yesterday,
> but then took it back down.
>
> The concern is that with three supporting jobs (one each for
> syslog, bind, and sendmail), if any one of them crash, then
> the job limit would allow user jobs to run simultaneously,
> causing some to bomb.

Many thanks to the gentleman (with much regret, I do not recall whom,
and I think I deleted the email after thanking him) who pointed out that
that if I'm interested only in *sending* email from the 3000 (which I am),
then I don't need to run *any* of those jobs!

In retrospect this may seem "obvious," given that the FTP job doesn't
need to run if the connection is always initiated from the 3000, but
I did not realize this.

This is very good news, but it brings up a question:

   Just how much of syslog + bind + sendmail is needed to support
   only outgoing email?

My understanding (still weak) is that BIND/iX is needed only for
incoming mail, so I can delete that entire account.  But what about
the rest?

I'm sure I'll never have enough time to research that, so the question
may have to remain unanswered.  Still, if someone "happens" to know off
the top of their head....

--Glenn