Mail Services (Reference)

The sendmail program is a mail transport agent that uses a configuration file to provide aliasing and forwarding, automatic routing to network gateways, and flexible configuration. The Solaris operating environment supplies standard configuration files that most sites can use. Chapter 24, Mail Services (Overview) provided an introduction to the components of mail services and a description of a typical mail service configuration. Chapter 25, Mail Services (Tasks) explained how to set up and administer an electronic mail system. This chapter provides information on the following topics.

• "Solaris Version of sendmail"

• "Software and Hardware Components of Mail Services"

• "Mail Service Programs and Files"

• "Mail Addresses and Mail Routing"

• "Interactions of sendmail With Name Services"

See Chapter 27, What's New With Mail Services (Reference) for a description of the new features that are included in version 8.12 of sendmail, the version that is in this Solaris 9 release. You can also read about changes to mail.local, mailstats, makemap, and about a new maintenance utility, editmap. For details that are not covered in these chapters, see the man pages for sendmail(1M), mail.local(1M), mailstats(1), makemap(1M), and editmap(1M).

Solaris Version of sendmail

This section, which includes the following topics, describes some of the differences in the Solaris version of sendmail as compared to the generic Berkeley version.

• "Flags Used and Not Used to Compile sendmail"

• "Alternative sendmail Commands"

• "Versions of the Configuration File"

Flags Used and Not Used to Compile sendmail

The following tables list the flags that are used when compiling the version of sendmail that is delivered with the Solaris 9 release. If your configuration requires other flags, you need to download the source and recompile the binary. You can find information about this process at http://www.sendmail.org.

Table 26-1 General sendmail Flags

Table 26-2 Maps and Database Types

Table 26-3 Solaris Flags

The following table lists generic flags that are not used to compile the version of sendmail that is delivered with the Solaris 9 release.

Table 26-4 Generic Flags Not Used in the Solaris Version of sendmail

To see a list of the flags that are used to compile sendmail, use the following command.

% /usr/lib/sendmail -bt -d0.10 < /dev/null

Note - The preceding command does not list the flags that are specific to Sun.

Alternative sendmail Commands

The Solaris release does not include all of the command synonyms that are provided in the generic release from Berkeley. This table includes a complete list of the command aliases, whether they are included in the Solaris release, and how to generate the same behavior by using sendmail.

Table 26-5 Alternate sendmail Commands

Versions of the Configuration File

The Solaris 9 version of sendmail includes a configuration option that enables you to define the version of the sendmail.cf file. This option enables older configuration files to be used with the current version of sendmail. You can set the version level to values between 0 and 10. You can also define the vendor. Either Berkeley or Sun are valid vendor options. If a version level is specified but no vendor is defined, Sun is used as the default vendor setting. The following table lists some of the valid options.

Table 26-6 Configuration File Version Values

Note - You are urged not to use V1/Sun. For more information, refer to http://www.sendmail.org/vendor/sun/differences.html#4.

For task information, refer to "Building the sendmail.cf Configuration File (Task)" in Chapter 25, Mail Services (Tasks).

Software and Hardware Components of Mail Services

This section describes the software and hardware components of a mail system.

• "Software Components"

• "Hardware Components"

Software Components

Each mail service includes at least one of each of the following software components.

• "Mail User Agent"

• "Mail Transfer Agent"

• "Local Delivery Agent"

This section also describes these software components.

• "Mailers"

• "Mail Addresses"

• "Mailbox Files"

• "Mail Aliases"