Installing and Administering Internet Services

Chapter 4 199

Installing and Administering sendmail

Conﬁguring sendmail to Reject Unsolicited Mail

Access Database Format

This section includes a few key points about the database and describes

the format of the database.

• Every line of the access database ﬁle has a key and a value pair.

• The value part of the database can be any of the following as listed in

Table 4-4.

The key can be an IP address, a domain name, a hostname or an e-mail

address.

Creating the Access Database Text File

You must edit the Access Database ﬁle manually. The default Access

Database ﬁle is /etc/mail/access. However, you can specify another

ﬁle in the sendmail.cf ﬁle.

Table 4-4 Access Database Format

Value Description

OK Accepts mail even if other rules if the running

ruleset rejects it. For example, if the domain name is

unresolvable.

RELAY Accepts mail addressed to the speciﬁed domain or

received from the speciﬁed domain for relaying

through your SMTP server. RELAY also serves as

an implicit OK for the other checks.

REJECT Rejects the sender or recipient with a general

purpose message.

DISCARD Discards the message completely using the

$#discard mailer delivery agent. This only works

for sender addresses. That is, it indicates that

you should discard anything received from the

speciﬁed domain.

### "any text" Where ### is an RFC 821 compliant error code

and “any text" is a message to return for the

command.