SUMMARY: Is the sendmail daemon a requirement for running mailtool?

From: Dave Martini (martini@raider.llnl.gov)
Date: Wed Jan 22 2003 - 14:13:41 EST


My original question:
I just upgraded to Solaris 9 and noticed that I can't send mail
> unless the sendmail daemon is running. Is this a requirement?
> I get a message "An Error Occured when trying to send your message"

The response I got from Rich Kulawiec summed it up.

Mailtool is a MUA (mail user agent): you can used it to read, compose,
and send mail. (Other MUAs: mutt, "Berkeley mail", pine.)

Sendmail is a MTA (mail transport agent): it actually sends and
receives mail from one machine to another. (Other MTAs: postfix,
exim.)

The problem is that your instance of mailtool has no MTA to talk
to. Since mailtool is a MUA and has no idea how to actually
send mail anywhere -- since it expects to hand it to a MTA --
you'll need to either (a) run a MTA or (b) configure your system
to immediately hand it off to a MTA running on another machine.

It's probably much easier to do (a), using a very minimal
configuration -- what sendmail folks call a "smarthost' config.
This means that your system will run just enough of a MTA
to hand mail off to a system running a real full-fledged MTA --
which in turn will actually do the real work.

-----------------------------------------------------------
Dave Martini
LLNL
_______________________________________________
sunmanagers mailing list
sunmanagers@sunmanagers.org
http://www.sunmanagers.org/mailman/listinfo/sunmanagers



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.7 : Wed Apr 09 2008 - 23:25:38 EDT