Sendmail

From: Bill Thompson (bill.thompson@GOODYEAR.COM)
Date: Wed Aug 21 2002 - 05:57:30 EDT


Sendmail gurus,

Normally, sendmail is run as a daemon under SRC control. When I do a ps and
grep for sendmail I see something like this:

sendmail: accepting connections on port 25

Now, I always thought this is how mail got sent and received however...

I was conducting some sendmail tests. I stopped the sendmail daemon
(stopsrc -s sendmail) and made sure it wasn't running (ps -fe | grep
sendmail). I then created and submitted for sending an email addressed to
myself.

When I ran sendmail -bp it reported "There is 1 request in the mail queue"
which is what I would have expected however shortly after that the email
was delivered.

I tried this a number of times with the same results. Even with the
sendmail daemon down, every email I created was delivered almost
immediately.

Ergo, my understanding of the sendmail daemon process must be in error.

Can someone explain what the sendmail daemon process is for (just receiving
mail?) and if I leave the sendmail daemon down can I always expect
immediate delivery of emails send from the system?

The reason this is of interest is I'm trying to eliminate the daemon on a
server that will go in our DMZ.

TIA for you help,

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