On Tue, 09 Oct 2012, Martin Husemann wrote:
On Tue, Oct 09, 2012 at 05:46:02AM -0500, Zhihao Yuan wrote:periodic, cron... too many things sends email to users. Could you tell me how NetBSD deal with these?Programs invoke /usr/sbin/sendmail and pipe the mail to it.
Yes, and that has been the normal way to do it under BSD-like systems for a long time (modulo name changes from /usr/lib/sendmail to /usr/sbin/sendmail or /usr/bin/sendmail).
Under NetBSD, the "standard" way of sending email from a program is to invoke /usr/sbin/sendmail with appropriate arguments, not to make your own SMTP connection. Even if you don't use the version of sendmail from sendmail.com, you should still have a /usr/sbin/sendmail program or script, and all programs are entitled to assume that /usr/sbin/sendmail will do the right thing. I thought that FreeBSD also had the assumption that /usr/sbin/sendmail would be present and correctly configured.
NetBSD's /usr/sbin/sendmail is actually a symlink to /usr/sbin/mailwrapper, which looks in /etc/mailer.conf, as Martin said:
There is a configuration file (/etc/mailer.conf) which tells the program how to deal with mail. Typical setup: sendmail /usr/pkg/sbin/mini_sendmail -smail send-mail /usr/pkg/sbin/mini_sendmail -smail which means that the pkgsrc mini_sendmail is invoked and told to forward the mail vial smtp to host "mail".
By default, NetBSD's /etc/mailer.conf points to /usr/libexec/postfix/sendmail, which is part of the default NetBSD installation. Users are free to install other mailers, and edit /etc/mailer.conf to refer to any program that understands the command line arguments traditionally used with sendmail. In
Martin's example, he has installed mini_sendmail from pkgsrc. --apb (Alan Barrett)