Installing SendMail

[Gary W. Swearingen]

Wade Smart <wade at wadesmart.com> writes:

> After all these years I have not ever had to write code to send email -
> until now. My php tutorial says that Unix uses sendmail. I looked in

Sendmail is one of many.  Calling it "old" may be misleading as it is
under current active continual development.  Many people seem to think
other mail software is easyier to configure, but, at least on FreeBSD,
I don't see how anything could have been much easier.  But it's best
to use what you can get help with and on *ubuntu that means not
sendmail.  Competitors typically replace many of the various sendmail-
related programs (even "sendmail") with programs that do the same
basic functions, to facilitate switching mail software.

> Synaptic and saw that sendmail is not installed. So, if I install it,
> will that interfere with my email client getting email from my isp
> server or cause any other problems? And, what all do I need to install
> -> sendmail base and???

In my limited experience (not *ubuntu), sendmail, etc, only handles
the sending of mail, while mail, fetchmail, and even apps like xemacs
or gnus get mail from the ISP directly with SMTP (POP or IMAP) which
is a relatively simple function available from many code libraries for
easy building into a program.  There are probably Python libraries
available for use (send and receive) from PHP if you want to avoid
external software like sendmail and movemail alltogether.

I'm guessing you'd want to remove current mail package(s) before
installing the sendmail package.

One thing to look out for in sending mail is that sendmail, at least,
is typically configured to send mail first to sendmail daemon on the
same computer, which spools it to a /var directory if need be, before
it gets sent out to another mail sender like at your ISP.

There's plenty of info on the Internet on all mail software including
many how-to articles (but not so many just for your OS, of course).