[plug] Small office email problems

[Kevin Shackleton]

A breakthrough with this problem - I set a client to a fixed IP address and filled the
hosts tables on the gateway and on the client with all the machine IPs and names.  I
was then able to pump through a 1 MB email to myself.  Only using ipchains
MASQuerading - no MTA or POP tools.

So I guess the question shifts to: is there a LAN configuration issue I've
overlooked?  I'd rather use DHCP than fixed IP, at least for a couple of the PCs which
may be set up on other LANs.

Thanks,

K.

Kevin Shackleton wrote:

> 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.
>
> Thanks,
>
> K.