The consequences of turning off sendmail

[Andrew Falanga]

On Sat, Sep 27, 2008 at 8:20 PM, Sahil Tandon <sahil at tandon.net> wrote:
> Andrew Falanga <af300wsm at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> This question comes from complete ignorance about this stuff (what
>> happens when turning off sendmail), but if I turn off sendmail will
>> system messages still get delivered?  Also, I'm going to be using this
>> box as a web server and I'm using Joomla!.  If I turn this off, will I
>> still get the notifications that new users have signed on, etc.?  I'd
>> like to turn it off because the box doesn't sit inside of a fully
>> qualified domain (it sits inside a 192.168.x/24 network), but will
>> host web services for www.whitneybaptist.org.  Obviously, requests
>> sent to 72.24.34.252 on port 80 are forwarded to this box (actually,
>> internally it's 192.168.2.23).  Also, (for those who have endured
>> helping me work through the issues with our mail server) until I get
>> things worked out with DNS this new server will not be hosting e-mail
>> for this domain (whitneybaptist.org), that's temporarily being done at
>> google mail.
>>
>> So, basically, what sort of trouble am I going to get into by turning
>> off sendmail?  Also, I think I'm going to implement DNS, an internal
>> thing, to make this box happy and then point the resolver to use the
>> Internet DNS servers for everything else.
>
> You can turn off the Sendmail daemon so that it does not actually listen
> for incoming connections or act as an MTA in the conventional sense.
> But local utilities like cron can still invoke the /usr/sbin/sendmail
> command to send you notifications.
>
> http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-questions/2005-December/107610.html
>

Thanks, just wanted to make sure before doing it.

Andy