sendmail not working?

[Chuck Swiger]

On Mar 15, 2007, at 6:15 AM, Nagy László Zsolt wrote:
> I know it is not the newest, but should work. I rebooted the  
> machine, but it did not help. By the way, I do NOT want postfix to  
> listen on TCP/25. I have to use an ssh tunnel. But I would like to  
> be able to deliver e-mail messages locally.
>
> Here is what I did for now:
>
> - deinstalled postfix
> - changed mailer.conf back to the original version
> - disabled postfix and re-enabled sendmail in rc.conf
> - started sendmail with "/etc/rc.d/sendmail start"
>
> And it works! But why couldn't I do this with postfix?

Sendmail combines the functionality of something which listens on  
port 25 (aka a MTA), with something which performs local delivery  
(aka a MDA, Mail Delivery Agent), although sendmail can also be  
configured to use procmail, the OS/vendor-specific MDA "mail.local"  
or similar, etc.  However, if sendmail is not configured to use an  
external MDA, it will perform local delivery without needing to route  
the mail via the MTA first.

Postfix is designed to keep a firm separation of MTA and MDA  
functionality for security reasons and always wants to receive  
incoming mail via the MTA...it will not short-circuit to doing local  
delivery the way sendmail can.

-- 
-Chuck