* @(#)READ_ME 6.6 (Berkeley) %G%
THIS IS AN ALPHA VERSION OF SENDMAIL. DON'T EVEN THINK ABOUT USING IT
IN A HEAVY PRODUCTION ENVIRONMENT. We've been running it (in various
forms) at Berkeley for several months, but our environment is far from
general. In particular, it hasn't been heavily tested for non-SMTP
environments. The good news is that most of the changes have been
Internet-related, and that has been tested.
REPORT ANY BUGS to sendmail@CS.Berkeley.EDU.
THIS IS COPYRIGHTED CODE. BY COMPILING AND RUNNING THIS CODE YOU AGREE
to upgrade to the production release when it comes out. You understand
that we hope this will be by March, but if there are serious problems
it may be longer than that.
PLEASE DO NOT MAKE THIS AVAILABLE ON PUBLIC FTP. Since it is still an
early release, I'd prefer that people get copies directly from Berkeley
to make certain that they have the most recent version. This isn't
an attempt to limit access, just to make certain that everyone is able
You don't have to install mail.local to run the new version of sendmail.
Many versions of /bin/mail take a "-d" flag or do local delivery already.
In particular, mail.local is largely specific to 4.4 BSD, and will not
be easy to compile elsewhere. It was written by Keith Bostic, not myself,
and was not intended for the "general case".
There are several related RFCs that you may wish to read -- they are
available via anonymous FTP to several sites, including nic.ddn.mil
(directory rfc), ftp.nisc.sri.com (rfc), nis.nsf.net (RFC),
nisc.jvnc.net (rfc), venera.isi.edu (in-notes), and wuarchive.wustl.edu
(info/rfc). They can also be retrieved via electronic mail by sending
Put "send rfcNNN" in message body
Put "send RFCnnn.TXT-1" in message body
Put "RFCnnn" as Subject: line
Important RFCs for electronic mail are:
RFC822 Mail header format
RFC1123 Host requirements (modifies 821, 822, and 974)
Other standards that may be of interest (but which are less directly
relevant to sendmail) are:
RFC931 Authentication server
RFC987 Mapping between RFC822 and X.400
RFC1049 Content-Type header field (extension to RFC822)
Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons the Makefiles are for the new
Berkeley "make" and will not work on the old, traditional make. I urge
you to get this make from Net2 (available on many public FTP archives).
Failing that, some directories have a "Makefile.dist" that will work on
older versions of make (but don't have the niceties included).
Similar comments apply to the man pages -- they use the new Berkeley
-mandoc macros instead of the -man macros. You can get these from
IF YOU WANT TO RUN THE NEW BERKELEY DB SOFTWARE: **** DO NOT ****
use the version that was on the Net2 tape -- it has a number of
nefarious bugs that were bad enough when I got them; you shouldn't have
to go through the same thing. Instead, get a new version via public
FTP from vangogh.CS.Berkeley.EDU, file pub/db.tar.Z. This software
is highly recommended; it gets rid of several stupid limits, it's much
faster, and the interface is nicer to animals and plants. You will
also probably find that you have to add -I/where/you/put/db/include
to the sendmail makefile to get db.h to work properly.
The structure of this directory tree is:
cf Source for Berkeley configuration files. These are
different than what you've seen before. They are a
fairly dramatic rewrite, requiring the new sendmail
(since they use new features).
doc Documentation. If you are getting source, read
op.me -- it's long, but worth it.
mail.local Source for mail.local(8), a local delivery program.
Older versions of sendmail called /bin/mail with a
special -d flag to mean "really deliver this mail";
this is a completely new (and much smaller) program
that does absolutely nothing but deliver local mail.
THIS IS SPECIFIC TO 4.4BSD, and is not under my
mailstats Statistics printing program. It has the pathname of
sendmail.st compiled in, so if you've changed that,
beware. This isn't all that useful.
makemap A program that creates the keyed maps used by the $( ... $)
construct in sendmail. It is primitive but effective.
It takes a very simple input format, so you will probably
expect to preprocess must human-convenient formats
using sed scripts before this program will like them.
But it should be functionally complete.
praliases A program to print the DBM version of the aliases file.
It hasn't been converted to understand the new Berkeley
DB format (which we are using).
rmail Source for rmail(8). This is used as a delivery
agent for for UUCP, and could presumably be used by
other non-socket oriented mailers. Older versions of
rmail are probably deficient.
src Source for the sendmail program itself.
projects / unix-history / blob