29.4. Changing the Mail Transfer Agent

Written by Andrew Boothman.
Information taken from emails written by Gregory Neil Shapiro.

FreeBSD comes with Sendmail already installed as the MTA which is in charge of outgoing and incoming mail. However, the system administrator can change the system's MTA. A wide choice of alternative MTAs is available from the mail category of the FreeBSD Ports Collection.

Once a new MTA is installed, configure and test the new software before replacing Sendmail. Refer to the documentation of the new MTA for information on how to configure the software.

Once the new MTA is working, use the instructions in this section to disable Sendmail and configure FreeBSD to use the replacement MTA.

29.4.1. Disable Sendmail

Warning:

If Sendmail's outgoing mail service is disabled, it is important that it is replaced with an alternative mail delivery system. Otherwise, system functions such as periodic(8) will be unable to deliver their results by email. Many parts of the system expect a functional MTA. If applications continue to use Sendmail's binaries to try to send email after they are disabled, mail could go into an inactive Sendmail queue and never be delivered.

In order to completely disable Sendmail, add or edit the following lines in /etc/rc.conf:

sendmail_enable="NO"
sendmail_submit_enable="NO"
sendmail_outbound_enable="NO"
sendmail_msp_queue_enable="NO"

To only disable Sendmail's incoming mail service, use only this entry in /etc/rc.conf:

sendmail_enable="NO"

More information on Sendmail's startup options is available in rc.sendmail(8).

29.4.2. Replace the Default MTA

When a new MTA is installed using the Ports Collection, its startup script is also installed and startup instructions are mentioned in its package message. Before starting the new MTA, stop the running Sendmail processes. This example stops all of these services, then starts the Postfix service:

# service sendmail stop
# service postfix start

To start the replacement MTA at system boot, add its configuration line to /etc/rc.conf. This entry enables the Postfix MTA:

postfix_enable="YES"

Some extra configuration is needed as Sendmail is so ubiquitous that some software assumes it is already installed and configured. Check /etc/periodic.conf and make sure that these values are set to NO. If this file does not exist, create it with these entries:

daily_clean_hoststat_enable="NO"
daily_status_mail_rejects_enable="NO"
daily_status_include_submit_mailq="NO"
daily_submit_queuerun="NO"

Some alternative MTAs provide their own compatible implementations of the Sendmail command-line interface in order to facilitate using them as drop-in replacements for Sendmail. However, some MUAs may try to execute standard Sendmail binaries instead of the new MTA's binaries. FreeBSD uses /etc/mail/mailer.conf to map the expected Sendmail binaries to the location of the new binaries. More information about this mapping can be found in mailwrapper(8).

The default /etc/mail/mailer.conf looks like this:

# $FreeBSD$
#
# Execute the "real" sendmail program, named /usr/libexec/sendmail/sendmail
#
sendmail        /usr/libexec/sendmail/sendmail
send-mail       /usr/libexec/sendmail/sendmail
mailq           /usr/libexec/sendmail/sendmail
newaliases      /usr/libexec/sendmail/sendmail
hoststat        /usr/libexec/sendmail/sendmail
purgestat       /usr/libexec/sendmail/sendmail

When any of the commands listed on the left are run, the system actually executes the associated command shown on the right. This system makes it easy to change what binaries are executed when these default binaries are invoked.

Some MTAs, when installed using the Ports Collection, will prompt to update this file for the new binaries. For example, Postfix will update the file like this:

#
# Execute the Postfix sendmail program, named /usr/local/sbin/sendmail
#
sendmail        /usr/local/sbin/sendmail
send-mail       /usr/local/sbin/sendmail
mailq           /usr/local/sbin/sendmail
newaliases      /usr/local/sbin/sendmail

If the installation of the MTA does not automatically update /etc/mail/mailer.conf, edit this file in a text editor so that it points to the new binaries. This example points to the binaries installed by mail/ssmtp:

sendmail        /usr/local/sbin/ssmtp
send-mail       /usr/local/sbin/ssmtp
mailq           /usr/local/sbin/ssmtp
newaliases      /usr/local/sbin/ssmtp
hoststat        /usr/bin/true
purgestat       /usr/bin/true

Once everything is configured, it is recommended to reboot the system. Rebooting provides the opportunity to ensure that the system is correctly configured to start the new MTA automatically on boot.

All FreeBSD documents are available for download at https://download.freebsd.org/ftp/doc/

Questions that are not answered by the documentation may be sent to <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.org>.
Send questions about this document to <freebsd-doc@FreeBSD.org>.