Sendmail-8.12.10

Introduction to Sendmail

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

Package information

Download (HTTP): http://www.sendmail.org/ftp/sendmail.8.12.10.tar.gz
Download (FTP): ftp://ftp.sendmail.org/pub/sendmail/sendmail.8.12.10.tar.gz
Download size: 1.8 MB
Estimated Disk space required: 13 MB
Estimated build time: 0.43 SBU

Sendmail dependencies

Required

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 the /etc/rc.d/init.d/sendmail init script included in the blfs-bootscripts-5.1 package.

make install-sendmail

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 may want to set it higher.

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.