On Tue, 15 Apr 1997 18:07:12 -0400 (EDT),
xiamin <ingerrn@cris.com> wrote:
> sendmail -q2m is running...but no pid file...

Run sendmail as daemon, then you'd see the pid file.  BTW, does
"sendmail -q2m" continue to run after processing all the queued
messages?  I don't believe so...

...

Ok, I don't know exactly what you want to do on your box, but I'll
tell you what I do on my box.

I keep a sendmail daemon always running on my box (sendmail -bd), and
my MUA (= mailer) submits messages by connecting to localhost:smtp.
The daemon in turn tries to resolve the recepient's addresses but it
usually can't do it because the box is usually not connected to the
Net, so the messages are queued instead.

When I connect my box to the Net, I flush the queue by "sendmail -q"
in /etc/ppp/ip-up.  While connected to the Net, the sendmail daemon
processes messages as they arrive (from my MUA).

The sendmail.cf file is slightly modified so that all out-going
messages look like they are from fa2.so-net.or.jp instead of the bogus
hostname daikichi.my.domain.  You can see it in this message's header.
It's not that hard to hand-tune sendmail.cf for it, though more
correct means to tune sendmail.cf is probably to use CF.

You can either have the sendmail daemon to resolve all MX by itself or
to pass any message to your ISP's SMTP server.  I do the former
because in my case, the latter adds some latency to the delivery time
which I find rather significant, but the former requires more time on
my side to process out-going messages because of the name resolution
(in the latter case, ISP's SMTP server does it all for you).  This is
also chosen by /etc/sendmail.cf settings.

One advantage of having sendmail set up this way is that I can make
any number of MUAs behave in the same manner, as long as they don't
try to talk to foreign SMTP servers themselves.  It works the same way
even if the new MUA doesn't care about the "From:" address.  Whether
it's /bin/mail or MH or pine or elm or Emacs RMAIL mode, it doesn't
matter.

I don't receive mail on my box.  My ISP's host does it for me, so I
suck the messages with POP3.

Does all this sound good to you?

Ken