*BSD News Article 59504


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From: j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: Another Security Question: Sendmail
Date: 12 Jan 1996 23:07:57 GMT
Organization: Private BSD site, Dresden
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Message-ID: <4d6pkd$h7c@uriah.heep.sax.de>
References: <4d0qhn$9j0@gol2.gol.com>
Reply-To: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de (Joerg Wunsch)
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Doug <doug@gol.com> writes:
> Is it my imagination, or is it true that anybody can send e-mail through 
> any system's sendmail?

It is.

> Is this a commonly accepted practice in the Internet community?

You should have permission by the relay machine's maintainer/owner in
order to do this.  It's sometimes useful, for example poor
freefall.freebsd.org dumps the entire email traffic for several
top-level domains (.au, .de, .fr, .za, to name a few) to configured
relay machines there.  This distributes some of the mail load (mail to
many recipients can be fed to the relay in a single connection).

-- 
cheers, J"org

joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE
Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)