MAILER.CONF(5)

NAME
mailer.conf - configuration file for mailwrapper(8)

DESCRIPTION
The file /etc/mailer.conf contains a series of lines of the form

name program [arguments ...]

The first word of each line is the name of a program invoking mailwrapper(8). (For example, on a typical system /usr/sbin/sendmail would be a symbolic link to mailwrapper(8), as would newaliases(1) and mailq(1). Thus, name might be “sendmail” or “newaliases” etc.)

The second word of each line is the name of the program to actually execute when the first name is invoked.

The further arguments, if any, are passed to the program, followed by the arguments mailwrapper(8) was called with.

The file may also contain comment lines, denoted by a ‘#’ mark in the first column of any line.

The default mailer is postfix(1), which will also start by default (unless specifically disabled via an rc.conf(5) setting) so that locally generated mail can be delivered, if the “sendmail” setting in /etc/mailer.conf is set to “/usr/libexec/postfix/sendmail”.

FILES
/etc/mailer.conf

EXAMPLES
This example shows how to set up mailer.conf to invoke the postfix(1) program:

    sendmail        /usr/libexec/postfix/sendmail
    mailq           /usr/libexec/postfix/sendmail
    newaliases      /usr/libexec/postfix/sendmail

This example shows the use of the mini-sendmail package from pkgsrc in place of postfix(1):

    # Send outgoing mail to a smart relay using mini-sendmail
    sendmail	/usr/pkg/sbin/mini-sendmail -srelayhost
    send-mail	/usr/pkg/sbin/mini-sendmail -srelayhost

Note the use of additional arguments.

SEE ALSO
mail(1), mailq(1), newaliases(1), postfix(1), mailwrapper(8)

pkgsrc/mail/sendmail, pkgsrc/mail/mini_sendmail

HISTORY
mailer.conf appeared in NetBSD 1.4.

AUTHORS
Perry E. Metzger <perry@piermont.com>

BUGS
The entire reason this program exists is a crock. Instead, a command for how to submit mail should be standardized, and all the “behave differently if invoked with a different name” behavior of things like mailq(1) should go away.