HOWTO Setup Nullmailer

From the authour's web-site: Nullmailer is a mail transport agent designed to only relay all its messages through a fixed set of "upstream" hosts. It is also designed to be secure.
We use nullmailer on a number of servers, where minimalist functionality is all that is required. All mail (typically only cron-job outputs, like logwatch and tripwire are then sent to our research-admin mailing-list, on ponyexpress.iat.sfu.ca. From ponyexpress, the admin-list will fire off copies to all subscribed research-administrators.

Install Nullmailer

hostname ~ # emerge nullmailer -va

This may pull in sys-process/supervise-scripts (or, you can emerge it manually), which will then require:

hostname ~ # rc-update add svscan default
hostname ~ # ln -fs /var/spool/nullmailer/service /service/nullmailer
(note:  older servers use the /var/nullmailer directory, rather than /var/spool/nullmailer...)

Note: you may have to create the /service directory first, by hand...

and

hostname ~ # /etc/init.d/svscan start

Configuration

Edit the following files to configure the machine to send mail to our mailing server (Bismarck).

/etc/nullmailer/adminaddr

admin@ponyexpress.iat.sfu.ca

/etc/nullmailer/defaultdomain

iat.sfu.ca

/etc/nullmailer/me

$hostname.iat.sfu.ca

/etc/nullmailer/remotes

ponyexpress.iat.sfu.ca smtp

/etc/mailname

$hostname.iat.sfu.ca

Status

hostname ~ # mailq

Testing

(note: you may have to emerge mailx to get the mail command)
Send a message to root, then wait a brief moment for it to be picked up and sent onwards.

hostname ~ # mail -s "this is a nullmailer test" root
Type your message, complete it with a ctrl-D + Enter

If everything is going properly, the adminaddr should receive a shiny new message in a short period of time!

Clearing the Queue

 hostname ~ # rm /var/spool/nullmailer/queue/*