The consequences of turning off sendmail

[RW]

On Sat, 27 Sep 2008 22:20:40 -0400
Sahil Tandon <sahil at tandon.net> wrote:

> Andrew Falanga <af300wsm at gmail.com> wrote:
> 

> 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
> 
The default for sendmail is:

sendmail_enable="NO
sendmail_submit_enable="YES"

which has the sendmail daemon listening only on localhost. It's fully
functional in all respects except that it can't be accessed from
outside. You can use localhost:25 as an outgoing mail server if you
wish.

Turning-off the localhost daemon altogether and having  
/usr/sbin/sendmail deliver local mail directly is possible, but
it's deprecated on security grounds as it needs to run setuid.