Sendmail-8.12.10

Introduction to Sendmail

The Sendmail package contains a Mail Transport Agent (MTA).

Package information

Sendmail dependencies

Installation of Sendmail

Before building Sendmail, we need to create users, groups and directories that sendmail uses with the following commands:

groupadd smmsp &&
groupadd mail &&
useradd -g smmsp -G mail smmsp &&
chmod 1777 /tmp &&
chmod 1777 /var/mail &&
mkdir /var/spool/mqueue

Install Sendmail with the following commands:

cat > devtools/Site/site.config.m4 << "EOF"
define(`confMANGRP',`root')
define(`confMANOWN',`root')
define(`confSBINGRP',`root')
define(`confUBINGRP',`root')
define(`confUBINOWN',`root')
EOF
cd sendmail &&
sh Build &&
cd ../cf/cf &&
cp generic-linux.mc sendmail.mc &&
mkdir /etc/mail &&
sh Build sendmail.mc &&
sh Build install-cf &&
cd ../../ &&
sh Build install

Configuring Sendmail

Config files

/etc/mail/*

Configuration Information

echo `hostname` > /etc/mail/local-host-names
cat > /etc/mail/aliases << "EOF"
postmaster: root
MAILER-DAEMON: root
EOF
cp -R cf/* /etc/mail &&
cp cf/cf/{submit,sendmail}.mc /etc/mail &&
newaliases -v

To automate the running of Sendmail at startup, install /etc/rc.d/init.d/sendmail init script included in the blfs-bootscripts-5.1 package.

make install-sendmail
[Note]

Note

The -qNm option to sendmail, where N is number of minutes, controls how often Sendmail will process the mail queue. A default of 5 minutes is used in the init script. Individual workstation users may want to set this as low as 1 minute, large installations handling more mail will want to set it higher.

Contents

The Sendmail package contains mail.local, rmail, smrsh, editmap, makemap, mailq, newaliases, sendmail, vacation, praliases and mailstats.

Description

mail.local

mail.local appends its standard input to a user's mail file.

rmail

rmail interprets incoming mail received via UUCP.

smrsh

smrsh is a restricted shell for Sendmail.

editmap

editmap queries and edits Sendmail map files.

makemap

makemap creates Sendmail map files.

mailq

mailq prints a summary of waiting mail messages.

newaliases

newaliases rebuilds /etc/mail/aliases.db.

sendmail

sendmail is the Sendmail mail transport agent.

vacation

vacation is an email auto responder.

praliases

praliases displays current Sendmail aliases.

mailstats

mailstats displays Sendmail statistics.