sendmail files precidence

[Scott Larocque]

I'm trying to under stand what the order in which sendmail db files are used. In particular( mailertable, relay-domains, and access). I believe that virtisertable is queried first then aliases and then these files, but in what order. Any help would be appreciated.

[Steven E. Protter]

Its not an order issue at all.

Each file has a purpose, which doesn't really conflict with the others.

relay-domains are used to tell the sendmail daemon which domains to relay mail for.

If you are using access to block a certain account at the domain will only affect the account. If you use it to block the entire domain then you wastintg cpu cycles.

for further discussion and explanation go to the source.

http://www.sendmail.org

SEP

[Scott Larocque]

I looked through the sendmail.org site but don't see where each file is explained, as to when or in what order they are used. I'm looking for a flow chart, so to speak, that explains at this point this file is accessed, then this file , and so on.

[Christopher Caldwell]

Good luck finding a flow chart. The answer is "it depends". Is this local mail? Is it SMTP mail? Are we relaying? Are we delivering? Does the virtusertable entry point to another virtusertable entry? Does it point to an alias?

The different databases have hooks into different rulesets; the rulesets get invoked (or not) depending on the type of mail. (For instance, grep virt in /etc/mail/sendmail.cf; note the number of rulesets that reference virt).

There's a README in /usr/contrib/sendmail/usr/newconfig/etc/mail/cf that explains some things. You might also check out the sendmail reference (the Bat book) by Costales and Allman. It's great if you're tired of Sominex ;-).

Or you could tell us what the problem is (or what you're trying to do) and perhaps we can lend a hand.