***** Important notes on sendmail 8.12.0 **** *) This is a significant improvement in security, functionality and speed ! I strongly urge you to install sendmail-doc and peruse files here and in /usr/share/doc/sendmail-doc *) Sendmail has extended control over queue management, and these changes can cause a performance drop if you don't change your local configuration. Old: MaxDaemonChildren controlled number of listener *and* queue runners Sendmail would fork as many children as needed to run the queues New: MaxDaemonChildren still works as a total limit MaxQueueChildren limits *only* the number of total queue runners MaxRunnersPerQueue limits the number of runners per individual queue (in 8.11+, you can have multiple queues) -- *AND* you can override this global limit on per queue basis! MaxQueueRunSize limits the number of messages processed per queue run Sendmail only forks up to MaxRunnersPerQueue for each queue per run The gotcha here is that MaxRunnersPerQueue defaults to one ! I've changed the default MaxRunnersPerQueue to 5, so deliveries aren't single threaded, but you may want to have more or less than 5. *) Check out queue groups!!! It can significantly improve throughput see /usr/share/doc/sendmail-doc/cf.README.gz and /usr/share/doc/sendmail-doc/op/op.{ps,txt}.gz *) Sendmail is *much* more secure now, and you'll never have problems because sendmail doesn't accept new submissions (when using the sendmail command, TCP connections will still be refused). Message submission (sendmail -bs, -m, etc.) now use a SGID binary and a separate g+w message queue. see /usr/share/doc/sendmail-doc/sendmail.SECURITY.gz for further info on the changes - which should be transparent to both the admin and user. *) The Debian package includes the ability to run sendmail in a variety of ways: MTA listener (port 25): None, daemon, or via INETD MTA queue runner: None, daemon, or via cron MSP queue runner: None, daemon, or via cron MTA queue aging: None, or via cron See /etc/mail/sendmail.conf for more details *) Sendmail now supports multiple queues! You can distribute queues across devices, and the queues are run independently - improving throughput ! *) There are new queue sort orders - amongst them are: FileName: removes the need to read .qf files Random: good for multi-queue runners *) Virtual hosting support has been enhanced in the os/site debian.m4 file. If you need more, checkout DAEMON_OPTIONS (Modifier=b) see /usr/share/doc/sendmail-doc/cf.README.gz and /usr/share/doc/sendmail-doc/op.{ps,txt}.gz let me know what you think - any more extensions you'd like to see? *) IPv6 support is inboard, but Linux does things oddly (and differently wrt kernel versions)... To run IPv6 on 2.2.x and 2.4.x, try this: FEATURE(`no_default_msa')dnl CLIENT_OPTIONS(`Family=inet6, Modifier=h')dnl DAEMON_OPTIONS(`Port=smtp, Name=MTA-v6, Family=inet6')dnl DAEMON_OPTIONS(`Port=587, Name=MSA-v6, Family=inet6, M=aE')dnl *) Sendmail now always uses TCP wrappers (/etc/hosts.allow /etc/hosts.deny) This is a change from prior versions where wrapper support was enabled via sendmail.mc. Please make sure you add the appropriate entry to the /etc/hosts.* file. The most likely candidate is to place sendmail: all in /etc/hosts.allow *) sendmail.st (for mailstats command) is *NOT* automagically created because writing the statistic can be a performance hinderance. If you want statistics: touch /var/lib/sendmail/sendmail.st *) You should *really* read RELEASE_NOTES... There are *many* changes for spam control. A) Relaying is, by default, prohibitted B) Mail from non-resolvable domains is, by default, prohibitted **** Other information **** This Debian package includes an automatic configuration utility `sendmailconfig' which can be run at any time to modify the current sendmail configuration. Most mail-related configuration files are kept in the /etc/mail directory. Specialized configurations can be accomplished by editing the file /etc/mail/sendmail.mc by hand and then running `sendmailconfig' to generate and use the appropriate corresponding sendmail.cf file. Such configurations can make use of the m4 configuration macros kept in the /usr/share/sendmail/cf directory. See also the other documentation in this directory and in the optional directory /usr/share/doc/sendmail-doc (installed via sendmail-doc package). Finally, the file /etc/aliases holds a text representation of the current mail aliases. See the aliases(5) man page for more information. If you edit this file, be sure to run `newaliases' to update the corresponding binary database. Rick Nelson cowboy@debian.org