[lug] sendmail hell

[John Karns]

On Sun, 29 Jul 2001, David said:

>    I have some questions about the behemoth known as sendmail.  Any comments
>    will *greatly* appreciated!
>
> John,
>
> Probably you know a lot more than I about sendmail.  However, I am

I doubt it.  Although I bought the O'Reilly sendmail book, it was edition
one, and I don't have it here with me.  I hae always relied on the various
distros to do the hard work of setting it up.


> having my own sendmail hell just now (what has worked for years does
> not anymore).  In fact this mail is itself an experiment for me 8-)

Ditto here.  I recently submitted a Q to this list about the fact that I
was having to manually flush the mail queue of incoming msgs via "sendmail
-q" with my current Linux installation, whereas previously that was not
necessary; the msgs were directed into my personal mailbox at the time of
POP'ing them.

I had always used the command "sendmail -bd -om", and specified the
"expensive" mode.  The sendmail SuSE config doc's still mention this
config as preferred for dial-up connections, but the sendmail (ver 8.9.x)
man page that came with a much older SuSE distro (6.4) state that the
"-om"  was ignored by sendmail and obsolete.  The -om parm combo isn't
even mentioned in the man page for the version installed with the current
versions of SuSE.


> So I am writing to point out something that may help.  See
> http://www.sendmail.org/faq/section5.html#5.3.2
> which points out that linuxconf causes the rewrite!! of sendmail.cf at
> every boot.  There may be other stuff there that will help you.

SuSE has a similar utility called SuSEconfig which does the same thing,
unless configured otherwise.

----------------------------------------------------------------
John Karns                                        jkarns at csd.net
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