Manual Pages  — MAILWRAPPER

But times changed. On a modern FreeBSD system, the administrator may wish to use one of several available MTAs.

It would be difficult to modify all MUA software typically available on a system, so most of the authors of alternative MTAs have written their front end message submission programs that may appear in the place of /usr/sbin/sendmail, but still follow the same calling conventions as "sendmail".

The "sendmail" MTA also typically has aliases named mailq(1) and newaliases(1) linked to it. The program knows to behave differently when its argv[0] is "mailq" or "newaliases" and behaves appropriately. Typically, replacement MTAs provide similar functionality, either through a program that also switches behavior based on calling name, or through a set of programs that provide similar functionality.

Although having replacement programs that plug replace "sendmail" helps in installing alternative MTAs, it essentially makes the configuration of the system depend on hand installing new programs in /usr. This leads to configuration problems for many administrators, since they may wish to install a new MTA without altering the system provided /usr. (This may be, for example, to avoid having upgrade problems when a new version of the system is installed over the old.) They may also have a shared /usr among several machines, and may wish to avoid placing implicit configuration information in a read-only /usr.

The mailwrapper program is designed to replace /usr/sbin/sendmail and to invoke an appropriate MTA based on configuration information placed in ${LOCALBASE}/etc/mail/mailer.conf falling back on /etc/mail/mailer.conf. This permits the administrator to configure which MTA is to be invoked on the system at run time.

Other configuration files may need to be altered when replacing sendmail(8). For example, if the replacement MTA does not support the -A option with mailq(1), daily_status_include_submit_mailq should be turned off in /etc/periodic.conf.