Sendmail

[Seth Dimbert]

Some History, then a question.

HISTORY:

Some of you may remember what first brought me to the LUG. We had need at my
office for an internal website, and I read online that this crazy thing
called Linux was the best way to do it. So I took an old 486 and installed
RedHat 7.2 on it. Out of the box, it was great, the webserver worked,
everyone on my local network accessed the site via the machine's IP address,
and joy spread across the land.

Then I decided to install the MS FrontPage Server Extensions... and
everything broke. I wiped the drive, reinstalled the OS, got some
specialized help with FP and now, once again, everything works. The box has
been running for months with no problems, the pages load in a snap,
FrontPage works (I know, I know... but it makes easy pages!) and I look
good.

But, now, things are getting more complicated. Big Boss Man would like some
more complicated features on the internal website, and I need to be able to
get email off of the box.

You see, right now, sendmail isn't working. Oh... it's running. It just
doesn't work. I turned it on (via WebMin because I try to stay as far away
from the command line as possible), but it's obviously not configured
properly; there are currently almost 400 emails queued up, waiting to be let
off the box.

So, I need some help. Here comes the question.

THE QUESTION

I know that I can find HOWTO's and tutorials on sendmail online. But, I've
heard sendmail is pretty complex, and I don't think I need 90% of what it
can do. All I want to do at this point is be able to send the results of
webforms to myself. So... can someone here give me a non-technical
description of:

 - What sendmail does
 - What it needs from me
 - What I need to set
 - What I can ignore

And, if possible, can I do it all via WebMin?

Thanks a gazillion.

-SD