sendmail.1m (2010 09)

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sendmail(1M) sendmail(1M)

NAME

sendmail - send mail over the Internet

SYNOPSIS

/usr/sbin/sendmail

[ mode ][ﬂags ][address ... ]

DESCRIPTION

sendmail sends a message to one or more recipients or addresses and routes the message over whatever

networks are necessary.

sendmail does internetwork forwarding as necessary to deliver the message to

the correct place.

sendmail is not intended as a user interface routine. Other programs provide user-friendly front ends.

sendmail is used only to deliver pre-formatted messages.

With no ﬂags speciﬁed in the command line,

sendmail reads its standard input up to an end-of-ﬁle or a

line consisting only of a single dot (

.) and sends a copy of the message found there to all of the addresses

listed in the command line. It determines the network(s) to use based on the syntax and contents of the

addresses, according to information in the

sendmail conﬁguration ﬁle. The default conﬁguration ﬁle is

/etc/mail/sendmail.cf

Local addresses are looked up in a ﬁle and aliased appropriately, and

sendmail also supports the use of

NIS and LDAP for address lookup. Aliasing can be prevented by preceding the address with a backslash

(

\). Normally the sender is not included in any alias expansions. For example, if ‘john’ sends to ‘group’,

and ‘group’ includes ‘john’ in the expansion, then the letter will not be delivered to ‘john’.

newaliases is invoked, sendmail will rebuild the alias database. newaliases is identical to

sendmail -bi. See newaliases (1M). Mail that is temporarily undeliverable is saved in a mail queue.

If mailq is invoked, sendmail will print the contents of the mail queue. The mail queue ﬁles are in

the directory /var/spool/mqueue

. mailq is identical to sendmail -bp. See mailq(1).

For mail delivery failures, users get a Delivery Status Notiﬁcation (DSN).

Note: DSNs resulting from attempts to relay a message to one or more recipients will contain a

"Diagnostic-Code" message citing the reasons for failure. This message will not contain the user’s

address.

A non-root user does not have access to the ﬁles and databases associated with

sendmail

, for example,

/etc/mail/aliases

, /etc/mail/aliases.*, /etc/mail/sendmail.st

, and

/etc/mail/sendmail.pid

Note: Only root users are privileged to kill any

sendmail process. Non-root users cannot send

signals to their sendmail process.

Arguments

sendmail recognizes the following arguments:

mode A mode selected from those described in the "Modes" subsection below. Only one mode

can be speciﬁed. The default is

-bm.

address The address of a recipient. Several addresses can be speciﬁed.

flags A ﬂag selected from those described in the "Flags" subsection below. Several ﬂags can be

speciﬁed.

Modes

sendmail operates in one of the following modes. The default is -bm, deliver mail in the usual way.

-ba Go into ARPANET mode. All input lines must end with a CR-LF, and all messages will be gen-

erated with a CR-LF at the end. Also, the ‘‘From:’’ and ‘‘Sender:’’ ﬁelds are examined for the

name of the sender.

-bd Run as a daemon. sendmail will fork and run in background listening on socket 25 for

incoming SMTP connections.

-bD Run as a daemon, but run in foreground.

-bh Print the persistent host status database.

-bH Purge the persistent host status database.

HP-UX 11i Version 3: September 2010 − 1 − Hewlett-Packard Company 1

Summary of content (10 pages)

PAGE 1
sendmail(1M) sendmail(1M) NAME sendmail - send mail over the Internet SYNOPSIS /usr/sbin/sendmail [ mode ] [ flags ] [ address ... ] DESCRIPTION sendmail sends a message to one or more recipients or addresses and routes the message over whatever networks are necessary. sendmail does internetwork forwarding as necessary to deliver the message to the correct place. sendmail is not intended as a user interface routine. Other programs provide user-friendly front ends.
PAGE 2
sendmail(1M) sendmail(1M) -bi Initialize the alias database for the mail aliases file. newaliases is identical to sendmail -bi. See newaliases (1M). -bm Deliver mail in the usual way (default). -bp Print a listing of the mail queue. mailq is identical to sendmail -bp. See mailq (1). -bs Use the SMTP protocol as described in RFC821 on standard input and output. This flag implies all the operations of the ba flag that are compatible with SMTP. -bt Run in address test mode.
PAGE 3
sendmail(1M) sendmail(1M) h being hours, d being days, and w being weeks. For example, -q1h30m or -q90m would both set the timeout to one hour thirty minutes. If time is specified, sendmail will run in background. This option can be used safely with bd. -qp[time] Similar to -qtime except that instead of periodically forking a child to process the queue, sendmail forks a single persistent child for each queue that alternates between processing the queue and sleeping.
PAGE 4
sendmail(1M) sendmail(1M) Loglevel>=2, else it logs as LOG_INFO messages at Loglevel>8. HoldExpensive On mailers that are considered ‘‘expensive’’ to connect to, do not initiate immediate connection. This requires queuing. CheckpointInterval=N Checkpoint the queue file after every N successful deliveries (default 10). This avoids excessive duplicate deliveries when sending to long mailing lists interrupted by system crashes. DeliveryMode=x Set the delivery mode to x.
PAGE 5
sendmail(1M) sendmail(1M) QueueDirectory=queuedir Select the directory in which the messages are to be queued. StatusFile=file Use this option to save mail traffic statistics into the specified file . DeadLetterDrop Define the location of the system-wide dead.letter file. ConnectOnlyTo Override the connection address (for testing). TrustedUser Define trusted user for changing the file ownership and also for starting the daemon. ControlSocketName Set this option to create a daemon control socket.
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sendmail(1M) sendmail(1M) ClientCertFile File containing the cert of the client; i.e., this cert is used when sendmail acts as a client. ClientKeyFile File containing the private key belonging to the client cert. DHParameters File containing the DH parameters. RandFile File containing random data (use prefix file:) or the name of the UNIX socket if EGD is used (use prefix egd:). Timeout.control Set this option to limit the total time spent in satisfying a control socket request. Timeout.resolver.
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sendmail(1M) sendmail(1M) DefaultCharSet=charset Use this option to set the default character-set used to label 8-bit data that is not otherwise labeled. DialDelay=sleeptime If opening a connection fails, sleep for sleeptime seconds and try again. This is useful on dial-on-demand sites. NoRecipientAction=action Use this option to set the behaviour when there are no recipient headers (To:, Cc: or Bcc:) in a message to action .
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sendmail(1M) sendmail(1M) LinkedIncludeFileInWritableDir LinkedMapInWritableDir LinkedServiceSwitchFileInWritableDir FileDeliveryToHardLink FileDeliveryToSymLink WriteMapToHardLink WriteMapToSymLink WriteStatsToHardLink WriteStatsToSymLink RunProgramInUnsafeDirPath RunWritableProgram DontInitGroups=True |False Set this option to true, to prevent program deliveries from picking up extra group privileges.
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sendmail(1M) sendmail(1M) needmailhelo Insist on HELO (or EHLO) before the MAIL command. needexpnhelo Insist on HELO (or EHLO) before the EXPN command. noexpn Disallow EXPN command totally. needvrfyhelo Insist on HELO (or EHLO) before the VRFY command. novrfy Disallow VRFY command totally. restrictmailq Restrict mailq command. restrictqrun Restrict -q command-line flag. noreceipts Do not return success DSN’s. goaway Disallow essentially all SMTP status queries.
PAGE 10
sendmail(1M) sendmail(1M) EXIT STATUS sendmail returns an exit status describing what it did. The codes are defined in : EX_OK Successful completion on all addresses. EX_NOUSER User name not recognized. EX_UNAVAILABLE Catchall meaning necessary resources were not available. EX_SYNTAX Syntax error in address. EX_SOFTWARE Internal software error, including bad arguments. EX_OSERR Temporary operating system error, such as ‘‘cannot fork’’ . EX_NOHOST Host name not recognized.