How to enable system email alerts?

[Havin_it]

Hi,

I'm setting up a server on my network, and I'm coming across lots of programs that refer to sending alerts to a specified address by email. When I ran Apache on my old Windows PC, IIRC, PHP had its own section in php.ini where the account settings for my ISP could be added so PHP web pages could send mail. There was a Linux section where the path to Sendmail would be added - I don't remember if there was a Windows equivalent to this directive.

My question is: Is there a system-wide configuration for sending mail from any process? That seems like the case, as Apache for instance has a conf item for an admin email address, but says nothing about configuring the account for sending the mail.

I've seen Qmail referred to as a secure replacement for Sendmail - what's the validity of that statement? Does it do the kind of job I'm speculating on here? As you can probably guess, my major problem is I have very poor knowledge of how email infrastructure works, which is making it difficult to make sense of the docs I can find.

Any low-brow, hand-holding guidance gratefully appreciated!

[juliuspc]

When you had servers running on your Windows box, you had to input ISP settings to send email. Apache would use those settings to log in to your ISP's sending-email server, and ask that server to send your mail.

With Linux, a myriad of programs exist to send mail from your computer -- you no longer need your ISP's sending-email server.

The trouble is, most of those programs are full-fledged mail servers (like the kind your ISP is running!), and by the sounds of things you don't need that.

So you do need to install some kind of program that provides /usr/sbin/sendmail (check your box to see if there already is one there) but you certainly don't need Sendmail or Qmail just to send mail. Have a look at net-mail/ssmtp.
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[Havin_it]

So... let's see if I have this straight (again, sorry for limited comprehension)

When I send an email to a given address (say me@maildomain.dom) it goes directly to the server at maildomain.dom without needing to be sent from a particular account (i.e. my ISP mailserver). I think I can get my head around that, but:

How is the message sender identified on arrival? Can I make up anything I like?
Is it possible this type of message might be seen as spam and dropped by routers en route, or by the receiving server?
Are all messages sent from /usr/bin/sendmail sent with the same ID?
My connection has a dynamic IP (though I use a DynDNS hostname) - is this a problem?

[randoguy]