How to Proceed

After you have established a policy, examine the available configuration files to decide if you can use major parts of any of them. Even under the worst of conditions, there is a fair amount of boilerplate information that can be collected safely.

The next step is to build rule set 3, which specifies a rule set for your individual mailers. Building rule set 3 is the hardest part of the job. Here are some guidelines:

• Beware of doing too much to the name in this rule set, as anything you do will be reflected in the message.

• Do not strip local domains in this rule set. Doing so can leave you with names that have no domain specifications at all. sendmail appends the sending domain to names with no domain, which can change the semantics of names.

• Do not provide fully qualified domains in this rule set. Although technically correct, fully qualified domain names can lead to unnecessarily long names reflected in messages. The SunOS configuration files define rule set 9 to qualify domain names and strip local domains. Rule set 9 is called from rule set 0 to get all names into a cleaner form.

After you have rule set 3 finished, the other rule sets should be relatively simple. Examine the supplied configuration files for hints.