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SENDMAIL(8) SENDMAIL(8)
NAME
sendmail - an electronic mail transport agent
SYNOPSIS
sendmail [flags] [address ...]
newaliases
mailq [-v]
hoststat
purgestat
smtpd
DESCRIPTION
Sendmail sends a message to one or more recipients, routing the message over what-
ever networks are necessary. Sendmail does internetwork forwarding as necessary to
deliver the message to the correct place.
Sendmail is not intended as a user interface routine; other programs provide user-
friendly front ends; sendmail is used only to deliver pre-formatted messages.
With no flags, sendmail reads its standard input up to an end-of-file or a line
consisting only of a single dot and sends a copy of the message found there to all
of the addresses listed. It determines the network(s) to use based on the syntax
and contents of the addresses.
Local addresses are looked up in a file and aliased appropriately. Aliasing can be
prevented by preceding the address with a backslash. Beginning with 8.10, the
sender is included in any alias expansions, e.g., if ‘john’ sends to ‘group’, and
‘group’ includes ‘john’ in the expansion, then the letter will also be delivered to
‘john’.
Parameters
-Ac Use submit.cf even if the operation mode does not indicate an initial mail
submission.
-Am Use sendmail.cf even if the operation mode indicates an initial mail submis-
sion.
-Btype Set the body type to type. Current legal values are 7BIT or 8BITMIME.
-ba Go into ARPANET mode. All input lines must end with a CR-LF, and all mes-
sages will be generated with a CR-LF at the end. Also, the ‘‘From:’’ and
‘‘Sender:’’ fields are examined for the name of the sender.
-bd Run as a daemon. Sendmail will fork and run in background listening on
socket 25 for incoming SMTP connections. This is normally run from /etc/rc.
-bD Same as -bd except runs in foreground.
-bh Print the persistent host status database.
-bH Purge expired entries from the persistent host status database.
-bi Initialize the alias database.
-bm Deliver mail in the usual way (default).
-bp Print a listing of the queue(s).
-bP Print number of entries in the queue(s); only available with shared memory
support.
-bs Use the SMTP protocol as described in RFC821 on standard input and output.
This flag implies all the operations of the -ba flag that are compatible
with SMTP.
-bt Run in address test mode. This mode reads addresses and shows the steps in
parsing; it is used for debugging configuration tables.
-bv Verify names only - do not try to collect or deliver a message. Verify mode
is normally used for validating users or mailing lists.
-Cfile Use alternate configuration file. Sendmail gives up any enhanced (set-user-
ID or set-group-ID) privileges if an alternate configuration file is speci-
fied.
-D logfile
Send debugging output to the indicated log file instead of stdout.
-dcategory.level...
Set the debugging flag for category to level. Category is either an integer
or a name specifying the topic, and level an integer specifying the level of
debugging output desired. Higher levels generally mean more output. More
than one flag can be specified by separating them with commas. A list of
numeric debugging categories can be found in the TRACEFLAGS file in the
sendmail source distribution.
The option -d0.1 prints the version of sendmail and the options it was com-
piled with.
Most other categories are only useful with, and documented in, sendmail’s
source code.
-Ffullname
Set the full name of the sender.
-fname Sets the name of the ‘‘from’’ person (i.e., the envelope sender of the
mail). This address may also be used in the From: header if that header is
missing during initial submission. The envelope sender address is used as
the recipient for delivery status notifications and may also appear in a
Return-Path: header. -f should only be used by ‘‘trusted’’ users (normally
root, daemon, and network) or if the person you are trying to become is the
same as the person you are. Otherwise, an X-Authentication-Warning header
will be added to the message.
-G Relay (gateway) submission of a message, e.g., when rmail calls sendmail .
-hN Set the hop count to N. The hop count is incremented every time the mail is
processed. When it reaches a limit, the mail is returned with an error mes-
sage, the victim of an aliasing loop. If not specified, ‘‘Received:’’ lines
in the message are counted.
-i Ignore dots alone on lines by themselves in incoming messages. This should
be set if you are reading data from a file.
-L tag Set the identifier used in syslog messages to the supplied tag.
-N dsn Set delivery status notification conditions to dsn, which can be ‘never’ for
no notifications or a comma separated list of the values ‘failure’ to be
notified if delivery failed, ‘delay’ to be notified if delivery is delayed,
and ‘success’ to be notified when the message is successfully delivered.
-n Don’t do aliasing.
-O option=value
Set option option to the specified value. This form uses long names. See
below for more details.
-ox value
Set option x to the specified value. This form uses single character names
only. The short names are not described in this manual page; see the Send-
mail Installation and Operation Guide for details.
-pprotocol
Set the name of the protocol used to receive the message. This can be a
simple protocol name such as ‘‘UUCP’’ or a protocol and hostname, such as
‘‘UUCP:ucbvax’’.
-q[time]
Process saved messages in the queue at given intervals. If time is omitted,
process the queue once. Time is given as a tagged number, with ‘s’ being
seconds, ‘m’ being minutes (default), ‘h’ being hours, ‘d’ being days, and
‘w’ being weeks. For example, ‘-q1h30m’ or ‘-q90m’ would both set the time-
out to one hour thirty minutes. By default, sendmail will run in the back-
ground. This option can be used safely with -bd.
-qp[time]
Similar to -qtime, except that instead of periodically forking a child to
process the queue, sendmail forks a single persistent child for each queue
that alternates between processing the queue and sleeping. The sleep time
is given as the argument; it defaults to 1 second. The process will always
sleep at least 5 seconds if the queue was empty in the previous queue run.
-qf Process saved messages in the queue once and do not fork(), but run in the
foreground.
-qG name
Process jobs in queue group called name only.
-q[!]Isubstr
Limit processed jobs to those containing substr as a substring of the queue
id or not when ! is specified.
-q[!]Qsubstr
Limit processed jobs to quarantined jobs containing substr as a substring of
the quarantine reason or not when ! is specified.
-q[!]Rsubstr
Limit processed jobs to those containing substr as a substring of one of the
recipients or not when ! is specified.
-q[!]Ssubstr
Limit processed jobs to those containing substr as a substring of the sender
or not when ! is specified.
-Q[reason]
Quarantine a normal queue items with the given reason or unquarantine quar-
antined queue items if no reason is given. This should only be used with
some sort of item matching using as described above.
-R return
Set the amount of the message to be returned if the message bounces. The
return parameter can be ‘full’ to return the entire message or ‘hdrs’ to
return only the headers. In the latter case also local bounces return only
the headers.
-rname An alternate and obsolete form of the -f flag.
-t Read message for recipients. To:, Cc:, and Bcc: lines will be scanned for
recipient addresses. The Bcc: line will be deleted before transmission.
-V envid
Set the original envelope id. This is propagated across SMTP to servers
that support DSNs and is returned in DSN-compliant error messages.
-v Go into verbose mode. Alias expansions will be announced, etc.
-X logfile
Log all traffic in and out of mailers in the indicated log file. This
should only be used as a last resort for debugging mailer bugs. It will log
a lot of data very quickly.
-- Stop processing command flags and use the rest of the arguments as
addresses.
Options
There are also a number of processing options that may be set. Normally these will
only be used by a system administrator. Options may be set either on the command
line using the -o flag (for short names), the -O flag (for long names), or in the
configuration file. This is a partial list limited to those options that are
likely to be useful on the command line and only shows the long names; for a com-
plete list (and details), consult the Sendmail Installation and Operation Guide.
The options are:
AliasFile=file
Use alternate alias file.
HoldExpensive
On mailers that are considered ‘‘expensive’’ to connect to, don’t initiate
immediate connection. This requires queueing.
CheckpointInterval=N
Checkpoint the queue file after every N successful deliveries (default 10).
This avoids excessive duplicate deliveries when sending to long mailing
lists interrupted by system crashes.
DeliveryMode=x
Set the delivery mode to x. Delivery modes are ‘i’ for interactive (syn-
chronous) delivery, ‘b’ for background (asynchronous) delivery, ‘q’ for
queue only - i.e., actual delivery is done the next time the queue is run,
and ‘d’ for deferred - the same as ‘q’ except that database lookups for maps
which have set the -D option (default for the host map) are avoided.
ErrorMode=x
Set error processing to mode x. Valid modes are ‘m’ to mail back the error
message, ‘w’ to ‘‘write’’ back the error message (or mail it back if the
sender is not logged in), ‘p’ to print the errors on the terminal (default),
‘q’ to throw away error messages (only exit status is returned), and ‘e’ to
do special processing for the BerkNet. If the text of the message is not
mailed back by modes ‘m’ or ‘w’ and if the sender is local to this machine,
a copy of the message is appended to the file dead.letter in the sender’s
home directory.
SaveFromLine
Save UNIX-style From lines at the front of messages.
MaxHopCount=N
The maximum number of times a message is allowed to ‘‘hop’’ before we decide
it is in a loop.
IgnoreDots
Do not take dots on a line by themselves as a message terminator.
SendMimeErrors
Send error messages in MIME format. If not set, the DSN (Delivery Status
Notification) SMTP extension is disabled.
ConnectionCacheTimeout=timeout
Set connection cache timeout.
ConnectionCacheSize=N
Set connection cache size.
LogLevel=n
The log level.
MeToo=False
Don’t send to ‘‘me’’ (the sender) if I am in an alias expansion.
CheckAliases
Validate the right hand side of aliases during a newaliases(1) command.
OldStyleHeaders
If set, this message may have old style headers. If not set, this message
is guaranteed to have new style headers (i.e., commas instead of spaces
between addresses). If set, an adaptive algorithm is used that will cor-
rectly determine the header format in most cases.
QueueDirectory=queuedir
Select the directory in which to queue messages.
StatusFile=file
Save statistics in the named file.
Timeout.queuereturn=time
Set the timeout on undelivered messages in the queue to the specified time.
After delivery has failed (e.g., because of a host being down) for this
amount of time, failed messages will be returned to the sender. The default
is five days.
UserDatabaseSpec=userdatabase
If set, a user database is consulted to get forwarding information. You can
consider this an adjunct to the aliasing mechanism, except that the database
is intended to be distributed; aliases are local to a particular host. This
may not be available if your sendmail does not have the USERDB option com-
piled in.
ForkEachJob
Fork each job during queue runs. May be convenient on memory-poor machines.
SevenBitInput
Strip incoming messages to seven bits.
EightBitMode=mode
Set the handling of eight bit input to seven bit destinations to mode: m
(mimefy) will convert to seven-bit MIME format, p (pass) will pass it as
eight bits (but violates protocols), and s (strict) will bounce the message.
MinQueueAge=timeout
Sets how long a job must ferment in the queue between attempts to send it.
DefaultCharSet=charset
Sets the default character set used to label 8-bit data that is not other-
wise labelled.
DialDelay=sleeptime
If opening a connection fails, sleep for sleeptime seconds and try again.
Useful on dial-on-demand sites.
NoRecipientAction=action
Set the behaviour when there are no recipient headers (To:, Cc: or Bcc:) in
the message to action: none leaves the message unchanged, add-to adds a To:
header with the envelope recipients, add-apparently-to adds an Apparently-
To: header with the envelope recipients, add-bcc adds an empty Bcc: header,
and add-to-undisclosed adds a header reading ‘To: undisclosed-recipients:;’.
MaxDaemonChildren=N
Sets the maximum number of children that an incoming SMTP daemon will allow
to spawn at any time to N.
ConnectionRateThrottle=N
Sets the maximum number of connections per second to the SMTP port to N.
In aliases, the first character of a name may be a vertical bar to cause interpre-
tation of the rest of the name as a command to pipe the mail to. It may be neces-
sary to quote the name to keep sendmail from suppressing the blanks from between
arguments. For example, a common alias is:
msgs: "|/usr/bin/msgs -s"
Aliases may also have the syntax ‘‘:include:filename’’ to ask sendmail to read the
named file for a list of recipients. For example, an alias such as:
poets: ":include:/usr/local/lib/poets.list"
would read /usr/local/lib/poets.list for the list of addresses making up the group.
Sendmail returns an exit status describing what it did. The codes are defined in
<sysexits.h>:
EX_OK Successful completion on all addresses.
EX_NOUSER
User name not recognized.
EX_UNAVAILABLE
Catchall meaning necessary resources were not available.
EX_SYNTAX
Syntax error in address.
EX_SOFTWARE
Internal software error, including bad arguments.
EX_OSERR
Temporary operating system error, such as ‘‘cannot fork’’.
EX_NOHOST
Host name not recognized.
EX_TEMPFAIL
Message could not be sent immediately, but was queued.
If invoked as newaliases, sendmail will rebuild the alias database. If invoked as
mailq, sendmail will print the contents of the mail queue. If invoked as hoststat,
sendmail will print the persistent host status database. If invoked as purgestat,
sendmail will purge expired entries from the persistent host status database. If
invoked as smtpd, sendmail will act as a daemon, as if the -bd option were speci-
fied.
NOTES
sendmail often gets blamed for many problems that are actually the result of other
problems, such as overly permissive modes on directories. For this reason, send-
mail checks the modes on system directories and files to determine if they can be
trusted. Although these checks can be turned off and your system security reduced
by setting the DontBlameSendmail option, the permission problems should be fixed.
For more information, see:
http://www.sendmail.org/tips/DontBlameSendmail.html
FILES
Except for the file /etc/mail/sendmail.cf itself the following pathnames are all
specified in /etc/mail/sendmail.cf. Thus, these values are only approximations.
/etc/aliases
raw data for alias names
/etc/mail/aliases.db
data base of alias names
/etc/mail/sendmail.cf
configuration file
/etc/mail/helpfile
help file
/var/log/mail/statistics
collected statistics
/var/spool/mqueue/*
temp files
SEE ALSO
mail(1), rmail(1), syslog(3), aliases(5), mailaddr(7),
DARPA Internet Request For Comments RFC819, RFC821, RFC822. Sendmail Installation
and Operation Guide, No. 8, SMM.
http://www.sendmail.org/
HISTORY
The sendmail command appeared in 4.2BSD.
$Date: 2003/12/01 17:02:41 $ SENDMAIL(8)
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