The consequences of turning off sendmail

[Sahil Tandon]

Andrew Falanga <af300wsm at gmail.com> wrote:

> This question comes from complete ignorance about this stuff (what
> happens when turning off sendmail), but if I turn off sendmail will
> system messages still get delivered?  Also, I'm going to be using this
> box as a web server and I'm using Joomla!.  If I turn this off, will I
> still get the notifications that new users have signed on, etc.?  I'd
> like to turn it off because the box doesn't sit inside of a fully
> qualified domain (it sits inside a 192.168.x/24 network), but will
> host web services for www.whitneybaptist.org.  Obviously, requests
> sent to 72.24.34.252 on port 80 are forwarded to this box (actually,
> internally it's 192.168.2.23).  Also, (for those who have endured
> helping me work through the issues with our mail server) until I get
> things worked out with DNS this new server will not be hosting e-mail
> for this domain (whitneybaptist.org), that's temporarily being done at
> google mail.
> 
> So, basically, what sort of trouble am I going to get into by turning
> off sendmail?  Also, I think I'm going to implement DNS, an internal
> thing, to make this box happy and then point the resolver to use the
> Internet DNS servers for everything else.

You can turn off the Sendmail daemon so that it does not actually listen
for incoming connections or act as an MTA in the conventional sense.
But local utilities like cron can still invoke the /usr/sbin/sendmail
command to send you notifications.

http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-questions/2005-December/107610.html

-- 
Sahil Tandon <sahil at tandon.net>