Hello linoders ...

Right now, I want to use my linode for something quite simple.
No http or ftp (ports 80 and 25 closed), but I do need a very minimal email capacity.

I'm not planning to use a domain name here -- username@lixx-nnn.members.linode.com seems to be adequate for incoming mail. However I need to send email out.

This is how it would work:
1. Email to username@mydomain.org (mydomain.org is hosted elsewhere) gets thoroughly filtered for spam and irrelevance (combined sequence of SpamAssassin and procmail) and is then forwarded to username@lixx-nnn.members.linode.com

2. The 'username' mailbox is processsed periodically (cron job) by a Perl script, which does something and then replies to username@mydomain.org

3. username@mydomain.org then forwards the reply to the original sender.

So far (only been here a week) I haven't set up anything to send email. Can anyone recommend a good, lightweight method of handling this very simple requirement? Traffic is predicted to be fairly low.

Setup: linode 100 + Debian, apparently exim-ready.

Answering my own question here ... there is nothing else to do, except add a .forward file ...

 | perl /home/<username>/<path_to_perl_script> 

The Perl script handles all the outgoing mail without a hitch.

Also one edit in /etc/exim/exim.conf ...

qualify_domain = lixx-nnn.members.linode.com

The default is
qualify_domain = 1
which will cause message to have headers like
Return-Path: <username@1>