Stop sendmail deamon !!

[Chris Fung]

Dear all,

If I stop the sendmail deamon, is that all the users in the Unix box will no longer receive messges ?? Including system messages ?? Since when I login to the Unix box, I will be prompted there is something in my mailbox. Is that I won't receive the mail message anymore if I stop the sendmail deamon???

Thank,

Chris,

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi Chris:

Yes, stopping the 'sendmail' daemon would cause messages to stop being sent. Why would you want to do this? There are valuable alerts (e.g. from EMS and via the 'syslogd' daemon) that you would want to receive.

If you are being flooded with useless crontab messages, there are easy ways to stop that.

Regards!

...JRF...

[U.SivaKumar_2]

Hi,
YOU can stop it by
#/sbin/init.d/sendmail stop
This will stop all mailing activities in the system.

regards,
U.SivaKumar

[Chris Fung]

The reason for me to stop the sendmail daemon is because sendmail is a well-known security hole in Unix System!! If I want to receive system message, in what way can I use the sendmail securely ??

Thanks,

Chris,

[Bill Hassell]

I'm not sure what you mean by security hole. Sendmail is like any other mail service: it must be configured with the rules that apply to your site. There are no security risks in reading email on Unix if you use elm or mailx. The risks in reading email are in using a PC and either a Netscape client, or you forward the email to an poorly secured PC mail server and use a poorly configured client. A .exe or .pif or .scr file is meaningless on HP-UX.

Sendmail can easily be prevented from receiving any email from outside the computer with /var/adm/inetd.sec. You will still receive email that originates from your cron jobs, EMS and other system alerts. However, it's important *not* to leave the email on the server. People often forget to read root's email and miss important diagnostic messages. Forward root's email to an address that is monitored on a regular basis.

[Jordan Bean]

Hi Chris,

Have a look at this thread.

http://forums.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/1,,0x94c40bce6f33d6118fff0090279cd0f9,00.html

[benoit Bruckert]

Hello,
You can stop sendmail and continue to send messages to outside your server.
I mean a message from 1 unix user to another unix user in the same server will not work,
But you can send a message to another MTA outside your system.
Of course without sendmail daemon you can't receive email (no listener on SMTP port !).

regards

[Arturo Perez del Galleg]

In my machine i have stopped the sendmail daemon with the command referred in other replies (/sbin/init.d/sendmail stop) but i receive the system's messages. The mail command is functional.
Try to do (after deactivating the sendamil service):
echo hello | mail user
Is this your problem?

[Ceesjan van Hattum]

Sendmail has no security riscs as long as you use it local.
Set in your sendmail.cf :
DS127.0.0.1

Systemwarnings will be prompted in local mailboxes. This is no problem at all.

Regards,
Ceesjan

[MANOJ SRIVASTAVA]

Hi Chris


If you stop the daemon none of the users will be able to get any messages ,including the system alerts , neither you will be prompted that soemthing is there in the mail box too .

It is never a good practice to do that as this also contains lots of infoprmation abput system alerts , cron jobs messages , lp requests etc . The better way I will suggest is to cleant the mailbox every week atleast for the users and also for the root .


Manoj Srivastava