[plug] Small office email problems

[Jonathon Bates]

> I have a problem with email provision for four users in a small office scenario.
> Our dial-up network connection works relatively well (50 kbps) and we have had no
> problems with running a Windows machine dialing up and getting our email from
> Bigpond using Outlook 2k.
> I have now set up a network with a Linux machine (RedHat 7.1) functioning as the
> PPP gateway.
> Web access works fine using squid - no trouble getting 1 MB files out to networked
> clients.
> I set up accessability to mail.bigpond.com by adding a MASQ rule to ipchains
> forwarding.  I have not set up an MTA.  The setup works for test files but appears
> to time out with typical (30 KB) emails, with all clients using Win98 and Outlook
> 2k.
> There appears to be two approaches to get email to work - overcome the MASQ
> timeout issue (if that's really what the problem is) or set up sendmail to
> (hopefully) overcome timeout issues.
> I've not set up sendmail before and could not find a recipe for a simple relaying
> configuration.
> I'd be keen to liaise with someone with expertise in this area of configuration -
> either effective MASQ'ing or MTA'ing.

Ok from the gateway machine just type in:
mail -v username at bigpond.com (whatever your bigpond email addy is)
type in a subject, press enter, then just type a . on a line and press
enter.
Then press enter at CC.
Tell us what happens! :)

Cheers
batesy