sendmail stalling during boot

[Chuck Swiger]

Simon Morgan wrote:
> On 8/18/05, Chuck Swiger <cswiger at mac.com> wrote:
>>Of course.  If you only want to deliver mail locally, and never consider the
>>network at all, /usr/libexec/mail.local will do that for you.
> 
> Do I need to somehow specify this as my MTA instead of sendmail or is it
> already used for local mail and I just somehow disable sendmail?

/usr/libexec/mail.local isn't an MTA, it's a LDA, or local delivery agent.

MTAs like sendmail and postfix use the LDA to actually deliver mail which 
should go to a local user account (ie, in the sense of locking the mbox file in 
/var/mail/$USER and appending the new message, or maildir's conventions, etc).

>> However, if you want to do SMTP, even SMTP on localhost via sendmail, you have
>> to use FEATURE(nocanonify) to disable DNS lookups.  Unless told otherwise,
>> sendmail is intended to run as a fully connected SMTP box, which means it has
>> to pay attention to DNS, MX records, address re-writing, alias expansions, and
>> all of the rest of the stuff it does.
> 
> Basically all I want is for any programs run on the system and mail
> their results to root to be able to do so.

I see.  Much of those automated messages assume they are using sendmail, they 
generally won't call mail.local directly, unfortunately.

You might find it useful to read "man mailwrapper" for more info.

-- 
-Chuck