sendmail administration

Editing the daemon invocation

In the standard sendmail configuration, one instance of sendmail runs as a daemon that typically serves two purposes:

It serves as the SMTP server.
It forks a sub-daemon at specified intervals to process the mail queue.

This daemon starts when the system enters multi-user mode and stops when the system is shut down. The command that starts this daemon is in the /etc/rc2.d/P86sendmail script. The default command in this file combines the -bd flag and the -q flag in one call to allow incoming SMTP mail and set the queue-processing intervals to 1 hour, respectively. You do not need to change this command unless you know that you want to change the interval or add other flags.