sendmail, 4th Edition

Modify init Files

In a non-set-user-id root world, you run sendmail differently than the traditional manner to which you have become accustomed. There are two differences that you should attend to before installing the new non-set-user-id root setup. First, you need to decide how to drain the local message submission queue. Second, you need to decide on a name to differentiate the two roles with the syslog(8) facility.

For local mail submission, sendmail will use a separate queue, one that is group read/write by the group discussed in the previous section. The sendmail program, in local message submission mode, sends a message and then exits. As a consequence, there is nothing running that can drain that separate queue of any messages that might be deferred there. The best way to drain it is with a queue processing daemon, such as this:

/usr/sbin/sendmail -Ac -q30m

Here, the -Ac command-line switch tells sendmail to use the configuration file named submit.cf. This is the special message submission configuration file that knows about the second queue. The -q30m command-line switch causes sendmail to wake up once each 30 minutes and process any deferred messages it finds in the second queue.^[38]

To differentiate one sendmail from another in the logs created by the syslog(8) facility, you can use the -L command-line switch (-L on page 243). One suggestion looks like this:

/usr/sbin/sendmail -L mta-daemon -bd -q30m
/usr/sbin/sendmail -L msp-queue -Ac -q30m

The first line is the invocation ...