Sendmail Operation Guide

Daemon mode

If you allow incoming mail over an IPC connection, you should have a daemon running. This should be set by your /etc/mail/sendmailrc file using the -bd flag. The -bd flag and the -q flag may be combined in one call:

/usr/lib/sendmail -bd -q30m

An alternative approach is to invoke sendmail from inetd(1Mtcp) (use the -bs flag to ask sendmail to speak SMTP on its standard input and output). This works and allows you to wrap sendmail(1M) in a TCP wrapper program, but may be a bit slower since the configuration file has to be re-read on every message that comes in. If you do this, you still need to have a sendmail running to flush the queue:

/usr/lib/sendmail -q30m


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