What is sendmail doing?

J

JonaEngel

I have a raspberry pi 3 b running 13.1-RELEASE-p2 GENERIC arm64 in which sendmail is using 30% -- 100% of IO.


How could I find out what sendmail is trying to do on this system?
 
I find sendmail a relic of an older time. You might want to add to /etc/rc.conf,
Code: 
sendmail_enable="NO"    # Run the sendmail inbound daemon
sendmail_cert_create="NO"   # Create a server certificate if none 
sendmail_submit_enable="NO" # Start a localhost-only MTA for mail submission
sendmail_outbound_enable="NO"   # Dequeue stuck mail
sendmail_msp_queue_enable="NO"  # Dequeue stuck clientmqueue mail
 
Thanks. I only disabled sendmail not all its ancestors.
For forensic proposes I'd still be curious if there is a way to find out what sendmail is doing (without dtrace).
 
You might find your answer in tail -f /var/log/mail.

Tracing syscalls is probably a waste of time before understanding the situation, by looking at the logs. You could be spammed or some daemon is shoveling email to you. Truss of sendmail at this point is like taking Aspirin for the pain instead of watching your feet to avoid stubbing your toe.
 
I've gathered that sendmail_enable="YES" actually launches mailwrapper, which means you can replace sendmail with dma easily (this is what I do). You can see how to do this in mailer.conf(5).
 
cy@ said:
The plan is to remove sendmail from 14-CURRENT and enable dma as default MTA.

Sendmail doesn't have the market share it used to, especially since it was purchased a few years ago.

Mail (MX) Server Survey

Report on the types and numbers of mail (MX) servers on the internet.
www.securityspace.com
Click to expand...
I'm in the 3.58% and it just works (Sendmail in jail as MX for my own domain SPF+DKIM+DMARC).
 
So? The major point is, base doesn't need a full-featured MTA, it just needs a tiny one with the most basic features (like local delivery and relaying to a "smarthost"). Or would you want Postfix or Exim to replace Sendmail in base? Would make little sense.

For all those who prefer sendmail, there's always mail/sendmail.
 
I think a full MTA should be part of a full OS (not like linux a kernel). I have no problem substituting sendmail:
with something better, but I do not know something better.

I think, instead of excluding sendmail, it should be upgraded for example to allow authentification. And cyrus
sasl is not acceptable, then also a replacement of it should be written.

Or in what direction should the development of FreeBSD go? Writing Desktop bloat?
 
I know sendmail because it gives me configuration&syntax headache.
My full,complete opensmtpd configuration, takes just 6 very readable lines in one file.
 
/etc/mail/mailer.conf
Code: 
sendmail        /usr/libexec/dma
mailq           /usr/libexec/dma
newaliases      /usr/libexec/dma
hoststat        /usr/libexec/dma
purgestat       /usr/libexec/dma
/etc/crontab
Code: 
*/30    *       *       *       *       root    /usr/libexec/dma -q

PR: 261536
 
People don't condemn sendmail because of its functionality, that makes no sense. They condemn it because it's barely supported, difficult for anyone other than bearded sysadmins to use, and is complete nonsense to be part of base considering the mail functionality required in a standard system.

It's not big, but still 60x the size of dma. Obviously functionality is completely different, but for anyone "not" running an actual mail handling system, dma does exactly what they need, and makes those things easier. Try telling a novice FreeBSD user how to get their system to deliver system emails via their authenticated smtp relay using sendmail. (and then find a good answer to their question about why a simple and common need uses an entirely over the top mailer and is still needlessly complicated in 2022).

And if you're actually running a mail system, where's the issue with "pkg install sendmail". Not only do you get to choose which mail application you want to use, but you also get updates without having to upgrade base or install the pkg anyway.

I used sendmail for a long time, but it's presence in base at this point is nonsense. It's like Microsoft using Exchange for basic mail functionality in windows nt and still having it in Server 2022 because of a few sysadmins whinging that they have a couple of machines that use it (and apparently are too idle to just install it in that case) and arguing it's not *that* hard for the other 99.9% of users to configure it to use a smarthost - as long as you jump through 17 hoops, install a few additional features and know exactly what you're doing in the first place.
 
Fully agree with usdmatt (except I can't say anything about MS Exchange, never operated that ;))

I build my base system without sendmail for quite some time, and indeed, dma(8) works perfectly fine on all the "regular" machines. In my case, I want all mail stored on some internal mail machine (so, no local delivery at all), and the configuration needed for dma to do this is dead simple:
Code: 
SMARTHOST my.mail.machine.invalid
NULLCLIENT

This one mail machine of course needs a lot more ... in my case exim as an MTA, dovecot as an MDA and for IMAP access. But that's "special purpose", so it makes sense to install that software from ports. People prefering sendmail would just install that instead.
 
usdmatt said:
Try telling a novice FreeBSD user how to get their system to deliver system emails via their authenticated smtp relay using sendmail. (and then find a good answer to their question about why a simple and common need uses an entirely over the top mailer and is still needlessly complicated in 2022).
Click to expand...

forums.freebsd.org

mail, metamail, gpg, openssl, sendmail, fetchmail, etc AS MAIL CLIENT

This thread is dedicated to simple command line tools as mail client for normal desktop users, in order to show that FreeBSD has a past and a future as desktop system. My contribution is to configure sendmail as smart host, in order that one can use normal mail to send mails. Perhaps someone...
forums.freebsd.org forums.freebsd.org
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top