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Author
Jason R. Mastaler
 
© 2002
  

TMDA FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

  1. How do I setup a whitelist?
  2. Will TMDA run on non-unix clients such as Microsoft Windows?
  3. Does TMDA have a web interface?
  4. How do I setup TMDA with vpopmail?
  5. How can I delete old, unconfirmed messages from TMDA's pending queue?
  6. How do I allow my ezmlm mailing lists to pass through TMDA?
  7. How can I prevent BBDB from asking about 'dated' addresses?
  8. Why don't my user+detail addresses work with Sendmail virtualdomains?
  9. Why don't my user+detail addresses work with Sendmail /etc/aliases?

  • How do I setup a whitelist? I'd like any address in my domain (domain.dom) to be able to send me mail without worrying about confirmations.

    You can allow senders, or groups of senders directly into your mailbox by adding lines to your incoming filter file. By default this is ~/.tmda/filters/incoming.

    For example, the following line will allow both anyone@domain.dom, and anyone@sub.domain.dom into your mailbox:
    from *@=domain.dom ok
    
    If you have many individual addresses and/or expressions you'd like to whitelist, you may keep them in a seperate file and then have TMDA access it using the following line:
    from-file ~/.tmda/lists/whitelist ok
    
    ~/.tmda/lists/whitelist would contain e-mail addresses and/or wildcard expressions, one per line. e.g,
    king@grassland.com
    *@myisp.net
    *@cs.myuni.edu
    *@=mycompany.com
    bobby*@peru.com
    
    See the TMDA Filter Specification for details on filter file syntax, options, and more examples.

    NOTE: For incoming mail, tmda-filter compares the address in the Envelope-Sender, the "From:" header and the "Reply-To:" header when looking for a match.
  • Will TMDA run on non-unix clients such as Microsoft Windows?

    You do have a couple of options under Windows on the client side of TMDA.

    You can configure a qmail relay to re-write the address of outgoing messages with tmda-inject, so that those running Microsoft Windows clients can take full advantage of TMDA. See `README.RELAY' in the contrib/ directory or one user's configuration details for a site-wide TMDA install using smtpd-auth, vpopmail and qmailadmin.

    TMDA also works perfectly under cygwin with the sSMTP sendmail emulation program (which comes with cygwin). Just add the following line your tmdarc:
    SENDMAIL = "/usr/sbin/ssmtp.exe"
    
    You'll then be able to tag your outgoing mail with cygwin-compatible MUAs (mutt, XEmacs, etc.) just as under UNIX.
  • Does TMDA have a web interface?

    Yes. QAdmin-TMDA is a TMDA configuration and administration tool which integrates into the QmailAdmin web managment system. For more information on QAdmin-TMDA's capabilities, see its original announcement.
  • How do I setup TMDA with vpopmail?

    See Lou Hevly's TMDA/vpopmail tutorial
  • How can I delete old, unconfirmed messages from TMDA's pending queue?

    TMDA comes with a utility called `tmda-clean' which does this for you. You can run it by hand, or periodically from cron. Run `tmda-clean' without any arguments to get a listing of possible options. tmda-clean should be run from the user account that owns the pending queue, not from root (unless root is running TMDA).

    For example, to purge unconfirmed messages older than 14 days each morning at 2AM, add the following crontab entry:
    0 02 * * * /path/to/tmda/bin/tmda-clean 14d

  • How do I allow my ezmlm mailing lists to pass through TMDA? Each list message is sent out with a different envelope sender address.

    You can whitelist the ezmlm list using wildcard characters. Here is an example whitelist entry for the qmail mailing list:
    qmail-return-*@list.cr.yp.to
    This will allow messages to get through when initially interacting with ezmlm to get subscribed, as well as after when list messages are delivered.
  • I use BBDB, and every time it sees a new 'dated' address it asks me whether I want it added to so-and-so's BBDB record. How can I prevent this?

    You can either set bbdb-always-add-addresses to 'never, or use a BBDB hook to filter the addresses before adding them to the database.
  • I'm running Sendmail, and noticed that my user+detail addresses don't work if the message is sent to a virtual domain. What's the problem?

    You need some special entries in the virtusertable (and a modern version of sendmail - at least 8.10.1 to get full functionality) to preserve the +detail portion of the address. For example, if you currently have the following in your virtusertable:
    bobby@peru.com    bobby
    
    you can change this to:
    bobby+*@peru.com  bobby+%2
    
    See the virtusertable section in your Sendmail's cf/README for the full details.
  • I'm running Sendmail, and noticed that my user+detail addresses don't work if the message is sent to a one of my aliases. What's the problem?

    If you have the following in /etc/aliases:
    webmaster: johndoe
    
    +detail is preserved for mail to johndoe+detail, but not for webmaster+detail.

    Unfortunately, there is no way to preserve the +detail portion in /etc/aliases. You must use the virtusertable for this (see previous question).