Why is Sendmail still around?

[Arthur Chance]

On 29/03/2019 13:14, Polytropon wrote:
> On Fri, 29 Mar 2019 13:02:00 +0000, Arthur Chance wrote:
>> On 29/03/2019 01:59, Mayuresh Kathe wrote:
>>> I am led to believe that Sendmail is still around in the install image
>>> as well as the base install because some need a way to send out mails
>>> without having to install a package/port. Can't the same be achieved
>>> with "msmtp" which is lighter and easier to configure for simple tasks
>>> than Sendmail. Hope FreeBSD isn't hanging on to Sendmail due to some
>>> political issue like being the baby of one of the lead developers /
>>> founders!
>>
>> Note that dma (the DragonFly Mail Agent) appeared in FreeBSD as of 11.2
>> (I think, maybe 11.1). It's basically an SMTP client for sending mail
>> off the machine, not receiving incoming. It can do local delivery too,
>> if anyone is still using that. When building jails I strip out most
>> "system" executables including sendmail and use dma if the jail needs to
>> send mail out. I also use it on headless servers, passing everything to
>> a smarthost.
>>
>> "man dma" for details.
> 
> This sounds like a welcome solution. Could you send your
> mail locally to sendmail, and then have sendmail use dma
> to transfer it to the SMTP "incoming" server of your mail
> provider? I. e., what a mail relay / "SmartHost" usually
> does (even though with a different mechanism)?

dma can be plugged in as a sendmail replacement by creating
/usr/local/etc/mail/mailer.conf (the same way as you use postfix or
qmail). It doesn't listen for incoming mail, but apart from that it
works. See
/usr/share/examples/dma/mailer.conf or use my version


arthur at arthur[4]> cat /usr/local/etc/mail/mailer.conf
sendmail        /usr/libexec/dma
send-mail       /usr/libexec/dma
mailq           /usr/libexec/dma
newaliases      /usr/bin/true
hoststat        /usr/bin/true
purgestat       /usr/bin/true

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