Mailx & Sendmail.cf

[hpuxrox]

Ok, I resently had to turn sendmail off for security ressions. I still want to send mail out to a relay host, so I configured a DS line in Sendmail.cf.

So my question is, if sendmail daemon is turned off, and I use mailx, does It used Sendmail binary in any way?

Thanks

[James A. Donovan · Accepted solution]

In a word....yes. The sendmail daemon does not need to run in order for you to send out e-mail. You only need to provide a value for the DS macro.

[Thierry Poels_1]

hi,

sendmail daemon does not have to active to send mail. For security reason it's even advised not to run the sendmail daemon, unless you're running a mail server. (can somebody still count all the security notes regarding sendmail of this year?)

regards,
Thierry.

[Thierry Poels_1]

oops..
....does not have to BE active to....

[Uday_S_Ankolekar]

sendmial daemon does not require to send out emails. Still if you want to flush e-mail every now and then use sendmail -q command and run it as a cronjob.
DS entry to send mails to mailrelay is a correct process
-USA..

[Jeff Schussele]

Hi Yates,

As USA indicated IF the first attempt to deliver the mail fails it will sit in the queue forever - unless you manually attempt delivery with sendmail -q .

What we did after disabling sendmail daemon is set up a cron job to run sendmail -q several times a day to repeat initial failed deliveries.

Rgds,
Jeff

[Geoff Wild]

Yes - it uses the /bin/mail binary which requires the senmail binary - unless you set a new command:

ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES
The following variables are internal mailx program variables. They
can be imported from the execution environment or set by the set
command at any time. The unset command can be used to erase
variables.


sendmail=command Alternate command for delivering messages.
Default is mail (see mail(1)).


So, do not delete the sendmail binary...however, you don't need to have the daemon running for mailx to work.

Rgds...Geoff

[Steven E. Protter]

My experience is that mailx will still work when the sendmail daemon is not running.

As noted above you may need to run sendmail -q to push the queue off of the server.

If your disable steps included removing the sendmail binaries, then you need to put them back for mailx to work.

SEP