Sendmail daemon

[kHz]

Can you stop the sendmail daemon and still be able to send mail from a server?

For example, if I have this on ServerA:
smmsp 682 1 0 Aug 29 ? 0:00 /usr/lib/sendmail -Ac -q15m
root 691 1 0 Aug 29 ? 0:35 /usr/lib/sendmail -bd -q15m

And I want to send mail from ServerA to ServerZ, can I disable the sendmail daemon? In effect, a ps would not show the above, but ServerZ would still receive mail from ServerA.

Does ServerZ need the sendmail daemon to receive the messages?

I believe you can send without sendmail daemons running, but I would like to know if that is true.

Thanks

 

[Deleted]

Don't think so..
An MTA must be running in order to send and receive messages between servers.

http://unixjunky.com

 

[daFranze]

yes, you can disable sendmail on ServerA, since ServerA is not a MTA but a MailClient, a mailclient just needs a program (eg. mailx) to connect to port tcp/25 on the remote host
If your application sends mail to localhost you need to configure localhost as a MTA (and therefore run sendmail daemon); btw you have to configure sendmail.cf so that eg. mailx can pick up the maildomain etc.

Best Regards, Franz
--
Solaris System Manager from Munich, Germany
I used to work for Sun Microsystems Support (EMEA) for 5 years

 

[spamly]

Here's a handy link that I've used on my Solaris 9 systems for sendmail configuration.

http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/features/articles/config_sendmail.html

It may be a little overkill for your question though.


On most of my systems, I don't run sendmail with the "-bd" option if I can help it. This option allows sendmail to accept incoming connections. I usually just have something like this running:
/usr/lib/sendmail -q5m

Although this sendmail background process is not needed to send mail out, it will allow the system to queue up mail that it was unable to send and retry in 5 minutes (Hence the -q5m option).

 

[kHz]

Thanks for your answers and the link to sendmail. For me the link isn't overkill.

Mail is always sent to a mailhost and the applications don't send it to localhost.

One other question, smmsp, what is that user for and why does it run with -Ac? And why is it in addition to the other one?