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Mail for the Home Network

Sendmail

Starting Sendmail

By JC Pollman and Bill Mote


Sendmail has a number of starting options. We will only give a brief over view of the common commands. You should read the man page for further information.

-bd         Run as a daemon.  Sendmail will fork and run in background listening on socket 25 for incoming SMTP connections.

-q[time]     Processe  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, `h' being hours,  `d'  being  days,  and  `w'  being
weeks.  For example,  `-q1h30m'  or  `-q90m'  would both set the timeout to one hour thirty  minutes.   If  time  is  specified, sendmail will run in  background.   This option can be used safely with -bd

So, if you set the time with the -q switch, do not be surprised if your email is not delivered for a while. With Redhat, check the file: /etc/sysconfig/sendmail. It will set the background/queue time so you only need to type:

/etc/rc.d/init.d/sendmail start  [Enter]  (or restart if it is already running)

Make certain you do not try to start sendmail if it is already running as you will not accomplish what you want.
 


Copyright © 1999, JC Pollman and Bill Mote
Published in Issue 45 of Linux Gazette, September 1999