Configuring mail without sendmail daemon

[James Beamish-White]

Hi all,

Is it possible to mail from a machine without sendmail running? Do you still have to periodically run sendmail -q to post messages?

I would like to send mail messages to an internal smtp host without running sendmail daemon, how can I configure this, or is it too hard?

Thanks,
James

[Sridhar Bhaskarla]

You don't need to run sendmail as a daemon to send messages. You can disable sendmail to run as a daemon but still can be able to send messages. You can use mailx for this purpose. However, you need to have sendmail daemon for receiving mails.

-Sri

[Craig Rants]

James,
That is the beauty of sendmail, you can still send email without the daemon running. Just enter /sbin/init.d/sendmail stop to stop the daemon. No other configuration should be required. You may want to change the /sbin/rc2.d/S540sendmail to /sbin/init.d/s540sendmail so it does not start on boot. But you should be ok from there.

Good Luck.
C

[Sanjay_6]

Hi James,

you need to have sendmail running to send mail to other servers. Even if it is within your own domain. To limit the use of mailing withing the domain, you should have the correct name resolution on your system, DNS if available would be good. No need to customise sendmail configuration. Just have to start sendmail server bu enabling sendmail "export SENDMAIL_SERVER=1" in /etc/rc.config.d/mailservs file and starting sendmail,
/sbin/init.d/sendmail start

Hope this helps.

Regds

[James Beamish-White]

Great! How do I tell the system which smtp host to use?

James

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Hi James:

While it is possible to direct outgoing mail without a sendmail daemon. I would configure sendmail as a daemon and then define a 'Smart Relay' the 'DS' macro in /etc/mail/sendmail.cf. That will direct all non-local mail to the Smart Relay; in this case, your SMTP server.

[Sanjay_6]

Hi James,

Here is a thread from hp docs site for you to look at,

http://docs.hp.com/cgi-bin/fsearch/framedisplay?top=/hpux/onlinedocs/B2355-90685/B2355-90685_top.html&con=/hpux/onlinedocs/B2355-90685/00/00/35-con.html&toc=/hpux/onlinedocs/B2355-90685/00/00/35-toc.html&searchterms=configuring%20sendmail&queryid=20011107-074825

Hope this helps.

Regds

[Roger Baptiste]

Hi,

You do *not* need to run sendmail daemon to send mails from the system.

Regarding telling which sendmail host the mails should
go to - you define this in
the /etc/mail/sendmail.cf
file of the system.
look for "'DH"" in the sendmail.cf file and specify
the host to which you want to send to corresponding to the
DH.

HTH
raj

[Robin Wakefield]

Hi James,

In your /sbin/init.d/sendmail you could remove the -bd switch from the sendmail line, but leave the -q15m (or whatever you have).

This way, any mails that are not delivered immediately, for whatever reason, will be retried every 15 minutes. This saves you having to put an entry in cron.

Rgds, Robin.