Arch Linux

awagner

Member

From: Mainz, Germany

Registered: 2007-08-24

Posts: 191

whose sendmail is being used? (postfix, msmtp, esmtp etc???)

Hi all,

today I've come across something that made me wonder if it's just my setup that needed some straightening or if there's something that could benefit from a more general solution.

I have started out in Archlinux with fetchmail-procmail-mutt-postfix. I am on a dialup account, so I had to configure postfix to use a smarthost on a couple of email adressees' domains. In fact, I could have used a smarthost for all my outgoing mails, but I wanted to learn about postfix/running my own. Over time, these have gotten more and more and I got tired of throwing so much resources at so simple a problem, so I installed msmtp but kept postfix. I've merely disabled postfix in the daemons array and configured mutt so as to use msmtp.
But today I found that most of my local system-generated mails (cron, logcheck, rkhunter etc.) have been hanging in postfix's mail spool and waited for postfix to come alive. That was because the system's /usr/sbin/sendmail was still postfix's.

I searched a bit but found no system-wide configuration to adjust sendmail to /usr/bin/msmtp.
(other than core's mailx, does heirloom's mailx provide such a configuration, but it uses ~/.mailrc and /etc/nail.rc whereas core's mailx uses /etc/mail.rc... And of course there are a dozen apps that have each one their own sendmail path adjustment (mutt, procmail etc.). But I don't want to touch 100 configuration files...)

Actually I suppose it would be the same issue with esmtp (only I can't check it because it conflicts postfix, which I don't want to remove) and other, similar tools. So many have a "sendmail-compatible" client, but no general to select which one to use.

I have now setup symlinks (renamed sendmail to sendmail.postfix and a symlink /usr/sbin/sendmail.msmtp to /usr/bin/msmtp and finally one to select what is being used, /usr/sbin/sendmail -> /usr/sbin/sendmail.msmtp) But I have the idea that a configuration setting still would be cool.

Any thoughts on this?

Andreas

Last edited by awagner (2007-12-12 15:34:22)

awagner

Member

From: Mainz, Germany

Registered: 2007-08-24

Posts: 191

Re: whose sendmail is being used? (postfix, msmtp, esmtp etc???)

update: I've found that both ssmtp and esmtp install a /usr/sbin/sendmail of their own (a least esmtp as a symlink). nbsmtp doesn't. Would it then be better to have msmtp install such a symlink, too? (Cementing the conflict between them?)

Another update: I've found a corresponding task on bugzilla: http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/4812

And another one: I've submitted a msmtp bug: http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/8913
  (Still, what about nbsmtp?)

Last edited by awagner (2007-12-12 22:15:41)