How to deal with workstation status mails?

[ITSEF Admin]

Hi all,

I ran into a little snag with our Kolab set-up here - I can't figure out how 
to "properly" deal with status mails that are sent automatically from our 
workstations. What I want is to let e.g. cron (or some cron-run scripts) send 
mail to the administrator to get feedback on the working (or not working...) 
of things like updates etc. Right now, our Kolab server is set up to accept 
only authenticated connections, hence, the "ordinary" way of sending these 
automated mails fails with "Relaying denied".

I *can* set up the MTA (exim) on the workstations to use authentication, but 
that raises another problem: If I choose to authenticate as user A, I cannot 
send mails as user B. Most of the scripts will try to send mail 
as "root@". "root@", however, is a distribution list, so I cannot simply 
add "root@" as a delegate to the account I use to authenticate with. Ideally, 

So far, I see two options:
- Remove the default "root@" distribution list and add an internal account 
for "root@" instead. Set this account to forward all mail to the admin 
account. Either use the "root@" mailaccount directly to authenticate or 
add "root@" as a delegate to the account I'm using to authenticate.

- Allow relaying for our own network. This, however, would allow anyone to 
ignore the whole "delegates" idea by simply sending mail directly - which is 
not what I want.

My question is thus: How do other people deal with this type of situation?
And also: Is there something like a "master account", i.e. an account that is 
allowed to send mail as anyone after being authenticated, despite everybody 
else having to adhere to the delegate system?

Thanks for any input!

Cheerio,

Thomas
-- 
==============================================================================
           Thomas Ribbrock             |   brightsight             
           itsef-admin at brightsight.com |   Delftechpark 1
           +31-15-2692529              |   NL-2628XJ Delft