redirmail v1.0 README
James W. Abendschan  jwa@jammed.com
http://www.jammed.com

Requirements:
 Perl 5 (tested on 5.003) w/ socket support
 
History:
 It's late winter in chilly Flagstaff, Arizona.  A lone UNIX system
 administrator, confronted with Yet Another Sendmail Bug, must
 install an updated on three different platforms.  It's late;
 he's dedicated but tired, and an episode of Mystery Science Theater
 3000 and a warm bed beckons him from his apartment.

 He asks himself "surely there can be a better way of doing this.
 I only have one real mail server; all the other systems just deliver
 their mail through it.  Why do I need sendmail on these systems?"

 He ponders.  He meditates.  He goes home and watches MST3k.  He
 sleeps.  And when he wakes, an answer swims up at him from dream--
 "a perl-based mail redirection script which both emulates sendmail
 from a commandline but can also tie stdio to the real mail server."
 He retreats to his corner in the Sun lab and after 3 days and
 a few nights he comes up with "sendmail-on-a-stick", colloquially
 known as "redirmail".

Can I use redirmail?
 Anyone can use it, but it's only useful to system administrators
 with several UNIX systems in a single cluster (systems which
 share a common set of user accounts and a single mailspool).

 If redirmail can't contact your mail server, or if the
 mail server rejects the mail for some reason, redirmail
 will attempt to deliver it again, every hour, for a week
 before dropping the message (an error message is written
 to stdout and an error code returned, but no dead.letter
 file is created.)

 However, everything is kept in memory -- if the machine
 reboots before it's able to deliver the message, the
 message will be vaporized.  If there's demand for it (and
 there already is) I'll add support for disk-based queueing.

Before you install:
 edit the redirmail program, and edit the following:

  * #!/usr/bin/perl (if your perl lives somewhere else)
  * $smtp_server - hostname of your SMTP server
  * $smtp_port - portnumber of your SMTP server, usually 25 (unless you're
    using this with ssh to facilitate secure mail delivery..)

 You can also edit these variables if you're so inclined:

  * $connect_timeout - how long to wait for the smtp_server before retrying
  * $session_timeout - how long to wait for the session to finish before
                       retrying
  * $retry_sleep     - how long to sleep between retries (default 1 hour)
  * $retry_max       - how long to retry (default 168; 7 days)

To install:
 Look at install.sh.  Drink some mountain dew.  Run install.sh.
 Cross your fingers.

To backout of the install:
 the install script makes a copy of sendmail called "sendmail.orig" --
 move that file back into place, and restore its file permissions.


(c) 1997 James Abendschan, JAMMED Systems