PMDF User's Guide
UNIX Edition


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1.5 sendmail Compatibility

On a PMDF system, a PMDF image is activated in place of sendmail; if you use a mail user agent that sends through sendmail, or if you invoke sendmail from the command line yourself, you will actually be running a PMDF image.

PMDF's sendmail replacement is designed for compatibility with mail user agent applications. However, it is not intended to be 100% compatible with sendmail when it comes to command line options for use by human users in submitting messages or management activities. PMDF's design has some fundamental differences from sendmail's design; PMDF as a whole provides a safer implementation of all sendmail's functionality, plus a great many additional capabilities. Not all sendmail command line options make sense for PMDF's sendmail replacement; the underlying functionality may be provided by PMDF in a way other than sendmail options.

Instead, for submitting messages from the command shell, see the pmdf send utility. For checking on any messages you have sent that are still in the PMDF queues, see the pmdf qm utility. Or for management activities such as testing address rewriting and general queue management, see the PMDF System Manager's Guide.

The command line options recognized by PMDF's sendmail replacement are shown in Table 1-3.

Table 1-3 PMDF's sendmail Replacement Command Options
Option Usage
-help Help; gives list of options supported
-h Synonym for -help
-t Use headers for envelope addresses
-odq Enqueue only, with priority set to nonurgent
-oee No error status returned to shell
-f user Set From: address to user. In general, must be superuser, or in the pmdf_world group, to set user to other than one's own username, though users in the pmdf_world_ username group are also allowed to specify -f= username .
-bs SMTP dialog to stdin/ stdout --- all other options ignored
-oi Line containing single dot (.) does not terminate message
-i Synonym for -oi
-r user Synonym for -f user
-- Any command line arguments after this option are ignored.
The following are always set when sending a message
-oem Mail error message back to user
-om The sender address will not be stricken, if present, from the recipient list during alias expansion
-m Synonym for -om
-odb Background delivery (asynchronous)
The following are ignored without error messages
-v Set verbose mode
-oo Old header format (with spaces instead of commas between addresses)
-odi Interactive delivery
The following are not applicable, and generate an error
-bd Start SMTP server
-bm Deliver mail
-bp Print mail queue information
-bt Test configuration
In addition, any other options not specified here are not supported and are ignored with an error message.


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