Sendmail Operation Guide
Sendmail
implements a general purpose internetwork mail routing facility
under the UNIX® operating system. It is not tied to any one
transport protocol; instead, its function may be likened to a
crossbar switch, relaying messages from one domain into another.
In the process, it can do a limited amount of message header editing
to put the message into a format that is appropriate for the
receiving domain. All of this is done under the control of a
configuration file.
Due to the requirements of flexibility for
sendmail(1M),
the
configuration file can seem somewhat unapproachable. However,
there are only a few basic configurations for most sites, for
which standard configuration files have been supplied. Most other
configurations can be built by adjusting an existing configuration
file incrementally.
sendmail is based on the following specifications:
RFC821-
Simple Mail Transport Protocol
RFC822-
Internet Mail Headers Format
RFC974-
MX routing
RFC1123-
Internet Host Requirements
RFC1869-
SMTP Service Extensions
RFC1652-
SMTP 8BITMIME Extension
RFC1870-
SMTP SIZE Extension
RFC1891-
SMTP Delivery Status Notifications
RFC1892-
Multipart/Report
RFC1893-
Mail System Status Codes
RFC1894-
Delivery Status Notifications
RFC1985-
SMTP Service Extension for Remote Message Queue Starting
RFC2033-
Local Message Transmission Protocol
RFC2034-
SMTP Service Extension for Returning Enhanced Error Codes
RFC2045-
MIME
RFC2476-
Message Submission
RFC2554-
SMTP Service Extension for Authentication
However, since sendmail is designed to work in a wider
world, in many cases it can be configured to exceed these protocols.
These cases are described in this topic.
Although sendmail is intended to run without the need for
monitoring, it has a number of features that may be used to monitor
or adjust the operation under unusual circumstances. These features
are also described.
-
``Basic installation''
describes how to do a basic sendmail installation.
-
``Normal operations''
supplies the day-to-day information you should have to maintain your
mail system. If you have a relatively normal site, these two topics
should contain sufficient information for you to install sendmail
and keep it happy.
-
``Arguments''
describes some parameters that may be safely modified.
-
``Tuning''
has information regarding the setting of configuration parameters.
-
``The configuration file''
contains the main body of information about the configuration file, and
is for people who must write their own configuration file.
-
``Other configuration''
describes configuration that can be done at compile time.
The remaining topics give brief but detailed
explanations of queue file formats and a summary of the support files.
NOTE:
This documentation is under modification.
For the latest possible version, see
ftp://ftp.cs.berkeley.edu/pub/source/sendmail/
© 2000 The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc. All rights reserved.