On 2007-01-05 10:25:30 -0500, Guy Hulbert wrote:
> On Sat, 2007-06-01 at 01:59 +1100, James Turnbull wrote:
> > >> sendmail when used on the command line sends mail via qpsmtpd.
> > > 
> > > I believe that to be a false (i.e. incorrect) statement. I don't
> > > know of any sendmail which injects mail into the local queue via
> > > SMTP. It's certainly not the case with the sendmail provided by
> > > qmail.
> 
> That is not what he said.  He is referring to sending mail
> via /usr/sbin/sendmail on the command line but he did not say via port
> 25.

Charlie didn't say anything about port 25, either :-). He was talking
about SMTP, and that seems to be perfectly on-topic to me - at least I
don't know how you could send mail "via qpsmtpd" without talking SMTP to
it.

> There *are* clients which use 'sendmail -bs' (for example, this
> behaviour by pine and some others is documented on cr.yp.to/qmail).

That's the other direction. There sendmail isn't talking SMTP to some
SMTP server, it is an SMTP server (although not via TCP, but typically
over a pair of pipes).

> There are also examples in mailing lists using 'sendmail -f', which you
> can find easily via google.

Now I'm confused. What does sendmail -f have to do with anything of the
above?

> > Neither do I - Postfix for example drops mail from sendmail into the
> > maildrop queue - not into the SMTP daemon.
> > 
> > Unless you replaced sendmail with some other mechanism your sendmail
> > binary should deposit mail into your MTA's local mail queue.
> 
> Yes it "should".  But your "sendmail binary" is often a sym-link to
> something else unless you are running sendmail and unless you check what
> it really does, you can't be sure.

It doesn't matter whether the sendmail binary belongs to sendmail,
postfix, qmail, exim or some other package. The point is that there is a
sendmail binary (in /usr/sbin on almost any unix system released in
the last 10 years) which accepts certain commandline options (-f, -t,
-i, -bm, maybe also -bs, -N and others) and a full mail message
(including headers) and tries to deliver it. That is "the sendmail
interface" people are talking about here. How it does the delivery
(writing to a queue directory, calling /var/qmail/bin/inject, piping to
/var/spool/postfix/public/cleanup, sending to a smarthost via SMTP, ...)
is of no concern to an application using the interface. (It is of
concern to the sysadmin configuring or modifying the system, of course)

        hp

-- 
   _  | Peter J. Holzer    | I know I'd be respectful of a pirate 
|_|_) | Sysadmin WSR       | with an emu on his shoulder.
| |   | [EMAIL PROTECTED]         |
__/   | http://www.hjp.at/ |    -- Sam in "Freefall"

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