Setting Up UUCP

For the stand-alone system under discussion, smail is best run as a daemon all by itself. Make sure this entry appears in etc/services:

smtp 25/tcp #Simple Mail Transfer Protocol

This will specify port 25 for SMTP connections, which the mail transport agent (MTA) will use for delivery.

Run smail as a daemon by having a system startup script run the following:

/path_to_smail/smail -bd -q10m

The -bd option causes smail to run as a daemon; -q10m tells it to process the message queue every 10 minutes. If you do light mailing (or do a lot during a solid block of time), consider increasing this, perhaps to two hours or more with a command line option like -q2h. When a connection to the SMTP port is detected (such as when UUCP hands off the latest batch of local mail), smail will fork and handle the SMTP connection.

When smail gets a wake-up call from a mailer (like rmail, for incoming UUCP deliveries, or elm, for outgoing messages), it looks in the file /etc/smail/routers to see what to do with the message. Here's my file:

# /etc/smail/routers
smart_host:
driver=smarthost,#What do I do with nonlocal mail?
transport=uux; # Deliver it via UUCP-path
               # to the machine specified with the
               # smart_path option in ./config

Upon receiving a message intended for a non-local address, smail checks this file. It sees it is to use the smart_host, which is defined in /etc/smail/config as sloth, the ISP's machine. The message is to be forwarded to sloth using the transport option, which is set to uux. uux is another program in the UUCP suite that queues the message with instructions to run mail in the UUCP spool to await the next UUCP connection.

Local mail is handled partially by an entry in the /etc/smail/directors file. The purpose of the directors file is to tell smail about some of the special options available locally, such as aliasing, forwarding to another user or to a pipe, or just about anything else you could set up. (Mailing lists on a two-user machine, anyone?) I've cut all but the entries which handle .forward files and the generic “What to do if we have a user who just wants his mail spooled?” scenario. Read the /etc/smail/config.linux/directors file for full gory detail:

# /etc/smail/directors
dotforward:
# general-purpose forwarding director
driver = forwardfile,
# problems go to the site mail admin
owner = Postmaster,
nobody,
# sender never removed from expansion
sender_okay;
# .forward file in home directories
file = ~/.forward,
# the user can own this file
checkowner,
# or root can own the file
owners = root,
# it should not be globally writable
modemask = 002,
# don't run things as root or daemon
caution = daemon:root,
# be extra careful of remotely accessible home
# directories
unsecure = "~uucp:~nuucp:/tmp:/usr/tmp"
# user - match users on the local host with
# delivery to their mailboxes
user:
# driver to match usernames
driver = user;
# local transport goes to mailboxes
transport = local

Once a delivery option is matched in directors, the transports file is searched to see what, if any, special options that particular delivery mode requires. For the trimmed directors file above, the corresponding transports file would be:

# /etc/smail/transports
# append message to a file
local: driver=appendfile,
# include a Return-Path: field
return_path,
# supply a From_ envelope line
from,
# insert > before From in body
unix_from_hack,
# comment out the above line for
# MMDF mailbox format and for
# use with the Content-Length
# header fields.
# use local forms for delivery
local;
# location of mailbox files
file=/var/spool/mail/${lc:user},
# group to own file for System V
group=mail,
# For BSD: only the user can
# read and write file
mode=0600,
# append an extra newline
suffix="
",
# notify comsat daemon of delivery
notify_comsat,

Now that you've set up smail to wait for UUCP to deliver mail from the outside world and to send mail to UUCP for transfer from your machine, you need to tell UUCP when to transfer files. This is most easily done via a crontab entry. Create it by typing su uucp, then typing crontab -e. The resulting file should look something like this:

# Call for transfers
25 0,9,11,13,15,17,18-23 * * *
/usr/sbin/uucico -s sloth
# Trim logfile
35 03 * * * find /var/log/uucp
-size +16k -exec cp /dev/null {} ;

The first line calls sloth every few hours during the day and hourly through prime time. Every afternoon it trims UUCP's logfile, which can grow spectacularly with frequent transfers.