This topic describes the configuration file in detail.
There is one point that should be made clear immediately: the syntax of the configuration file is designed to be reasonably easy to parse, since this is done every time sendmail(1M) starts up, rather than easy for a human to read or write.
The configuration file is organized as a series of lines, each of which begins with a single character defining the semantics for the rest of the line. Lines beginning with a space or a tab are continuation lines (although the semantics are not well defined in many places). Blank lines and lines beginning with a hash symbol (#) are comments.