37.15. Configuring the Sendmail Configuration Module
The Module Config link on the main page takes you to a form seen in many other modules for editing settings that apply to the operation of the module itself. Those listed under Configurable options relate to its user interface, while those under System configuration define the paths to the Sendmail programs and files.
Settings in the latter group do not usually need to be changed. By default they are set to match the Sendmail package supplied with your operating system. If you have compiled and installed the MTA yourself from the source code, however, then it is quite possible that they will be incorrect.
The available module configuration options are shown in Table 37.1.
| Seconds to wait before refreshing mail queue | When Don't refresh is selected, the mail queue display will only be refreshed when you click the reload button in your browser. On the other hand, if the second option is selected and a number entered, the browser will automatically reload the page after that number of seconds has elapsed. This can be useful if you want to continually monitor the mail queue as it changes. |
| Mail messages to display per page | This field controls the number of email messages that appear per page in the users' mailboxes and when viewing the mail queue. You may want to increase it if you like to use a large browser window. |
| Width to wrap mail messages at | When reading a message in a mailbox or in the queue, Webmin will automatically wrap the body text so that each line is less than the number of characters specified in this field. You may want to change it depending on the width of your browser window. |
| Sort tables by | When Order in file is chosen, the lists of aliases, address mappings, routed domains, outgoing addresses, domain mappings, and spam control rules will be displayed in the order in which they appear in their source text files, which is typically the order in which they were added. If Name is chosen, however, they will be sorted by name instead, which can make individual entries much easier to find. |
| Send mail via connection to | As Section 37.10 “Reading Users' Email” explains, this module can be used to compose and send email messages. When this field is set to Sendmail executable, Webmin will send these messages by running the Sendmail command with the –t option—usually /usr/lib/sendmail. Assuming your mail server is running properly, this should work fine. To have messages sent via an SMTP connection to some other MTA instead, select the second option for this field and enter another mail server's hostname into the text box. You can even enter localhost to have email sent via the Sendmail server on this system, but using SMTP instead of running a program. |
| When reading mail start at | When Latest is selected, user mailboxes will be sorted so that the newest email appears first. If the Oldest option is chosen, the oldest email will appear at the top of the list instead. |
| Wrapping mode in mail textarea | This option sets the wrapping mode used for bv HTML textarea on the mail composition page. If Off is chosen, no wrapping is done and long lines will cause the text box to scroll to the right. If any of the other options are selected, long lines will be wrapped as you entered them (but not in the actual email!). |
| Keep track of read/unread emails | When this field is set to Yes, the module will keep track of which messages in user mailboxes have been read and show ticks next to those that have. It will also display additional buttons for marking single emails or multiple messages as read or unread. This feature is really only useful if you are using the module as an actual mail client, which is why the default for this field is No. |
| Show To: address in mailboxes? | When Yes is selected, the display of messages in a user's mailbox will include the To address as well as the From, Subject, and Date headers. This can be useful if mail to several different addresses ends up in the same mailbox. |
| Maxiumum number of records to show in tables | If the number of entries in the list of aliases, address mappings, routed domains, outgoing addresses, domain mappings, or spam control rules exceeds the number in this field, then they will not be shown. Instead, a search form will appear allowing you to find entries by name. This is done to prevent an extremely large alias file, making the Mail Aliases page enormous and slow to display. On most small systems the default limit of 200 will never be hit. |
| Show buttons at top for | On the pages for listing a user's email and reading a single message, buttons appear at the bottom for deleting, replying, and so on. This field controls when those same buttons appear at the top as well, so that you do not have to scroll all the way down to the Both the mailbox list and single message display pages have buttons at the top.
Mailboxes only Only the mailbox list has buttons above the table as well as at the bottom. Never Neither page has buttons at the top, only at the bottom. |
| Headers to show in mail queue | The boxes checked for this field determine which columns are shown on the mail queue listing. The first five correspond to actual email headers, while the Size box enables the display of message sizes and the Status box enables the display of the current status or last error. |
| Sort mail queue by | This field controls the order in which messages in Sendmail's mail queue are shown. The default is to sort by queue ID, but you can have the module sort by other attributes of each message instead—but at the cost of slowing down the display for a large queue. |
| Show size of mail queue on main page? | This field determines if the current size of the mail queue is shown on the module's main page below the mail queue icon. You may want to disable this if your system consistently has a large queue that Webmin is slow to count. |
| Minimum mail file size to index | Normally, Webmin creates an index file of messages in a user's mailbox so that it does not have to reread the mail file on every page. This speeds up the display of the mailbox and single email pages, but can break down if the mailbox changes often. A common symptom of index failure is the display of numerous blank messages instead of the actual contents of a mailbox. This field can be used to turn off indexing altogether, or limit it to only large mail files. The default of 1 MB stops the indexing of small mailboxes that are frequently cleared by POP3, while enabling it for large boxes that are left off the server. |
| Forward messages with quoting? | When this option is enabled (as it is by default), single messages forwarded using the module's mail reading feature will have > characters prepended to each line. Since some people don't like this form of quoting, this configuration field can be used to turn it off. |
| Confirm before deleting messages? | This field determines if Webmin will ask you for confirmation before deleting messages in a user's mailbox. |
| Full path to sendmail.cf | This field must contain the full path to the primary Sendmail configuration file, sendmail.cf. It can almost always be found in the /etc or /etc/mail directories. |
| Sendmail M4 base directory | If you want to use the module's M4 reconfiguration page (covered in Section 37.11 “Adding Sendmail Features with M4”), this field must be set to the base directory under which all the .m4 file subdirectories can be found. These subdirectories are named cf, domain, feature, mailer, and ostype among others. If you have compiled Sendmail from the source code, the M4 configuration files will be included with the source and you should set this field to point to their base directory. It is important to use the files that come with the version of Sendmail you actually have installed, so that the primary configuration file can be generated properly. |
| Full path to M4 config file | To use the module's M4 reconfiguration page, this field must be set to the primary M4 configuration file that specifies which features to enable. If you have compiled Sendmail from the source code, the primary file will be one of the generic-*.mc files in the cf directory under the M4 base directory. The exact one depends on your operating system—for example, generic-linux.mc should be used if you are running Linux. Of course, if you have already manually created your own primary M4 configuration file and generated a sendmail.cf file from it, then its path must be entered here instead. |
| Full path to sendmail pid file | This field must contain the full path to the file into which the Sendmail server process writes its process ID, such as /var/run/sendmail.pid. If it is not set correctly, the module will not be able to tell that the server is running. |
| Command to start sendmail in server mode | This field must contain a command to start the Sendmail server as a background process, which is run when the Start Sendmail button on the module's main page is clicked. If you have compiled the program yourself, you should set it to /usr/lib/sendmail –bd, assuming that the sendmail executable is in the /usr/lib directory. On many operating systems, this field will be set by default to use a bootup script like /etc/init.d/sendmail start, which is included with the Sendmail package for the OS. This is unlikely to work if you have compiled the server yourself instead of using the package. |
| Command to stop Sendmail | When Kill process is selected for this field, the module will simply kill the Sendmail server process when the Stop Sendmail button on the main page is clicked. If a command is specified (such as /etc/init.d/sendmail stop) it will be run instead. If you have compiled and installed manually, you should select the Kill process option as no bootup script to stop the server is likely to exist. |
| Makemap command | This field must contain the path to the makemap command used for rebuilding DBM files from text files. It is acceptable to enter just makemap if the program is in one of Webmin's search path directories, such as /usr/bin or /usr/local/bin. |
| Sendmail command | This configuration field must contain the full path to the actual Sendmail program, such as /usr/sbin/sendmail or /usr/lib/sendmail. |
| Full path to sendmail aliases file | When Automatic is selected, the module works out the path to the Sendmail automatically aliases text files from the AliasFile entry in the sendmail.cf file. If for some reason this is not correct on your system, however, you can choose the second option and enter a specific alias file path instead. |
| Source file for virtusers database | The address mappings (also known as virtusers) that Sendmail actually uses are taken from a DBM format file, rather than from the text file that the module reads and edits. The path to the DBM is specified in sendmail.cf, and when this configuration field is set to Same as DBM, the module will assume that the text file has the same path, minus any .db or .dir extension. Even though this is almost always the right thing to do, the source text file from which the DBM is built may be in a totally different location on some systems. If this is the case on your system, then you must select the section option for this field and enter the correct path to the virtusers text file, such as /usr/local/etc/virtusers. |
| Source file for mailertable database | This field has a similar purpose to the Source file for virtusers database, but applies to the domain routing or mailertable file instead. Once again, the default of Same as DBM is almost always correct. |
| Source file for generics database | This field has a similar purpose to the Source file for virtusers database, but applies to the outgoing addresses or generics file instead—the usage of which is not covered in this chapter. |
| Source file for the access database | This field has a similar purpose to the Source file for virtusers database, but applies to the spam control or access file. |
| Source file for the domains database | This field has a similar purpose to the Source file for virtusers database, but applies to the domain mapping or domaintable file. |
| User mail file location | For the User Mailboxes feature of the module to work properly, this field must be set to the directory containing user mail files, such as /var/mail. The only time you would need to change it is if you have reconfigured Sendmail to deliver to a different directory—for example, by using Procmail as the local delivery agent. If the option File under home directory is selected, the module will look for a mail file in each user's home directory instead. The exact filename is specified by the Mail file in home directory field below. Again, this should only be chosen if you have actually configured Sendmail to deliver to such files instead of to the /var/mail directory. |
| Mail file in home directory | When the User mail file location configuration field is set to File under home directory, this field must contain the name of a file in users' home directory to which incoming email is appended. The default is mbox, but Mailbox or Inbox may be used on some systems. |
| Mail file directory style | When a directory is specified for the User mail file location field, this menu controls where the module looks under it for the actual mail files. The default of mail/username tells the module that mail files are in the directory, and have the same name as the user who owns them. For 99 percent of systems, this is correct and thus this field should not be changed. If you have a large number of users on your system, however, and have configured Sendmail to group user mail files into subdirectories under /var/mail, then the other menu options will be useful. Their meanings should be self-explanatory. |
| SMRSH directory | SMRSH is a program that Sendmail can be configured to use when executing programs from aliases or .forward files. It limits the programs that can be run to those in a particular directory, usually /etc/smrsh. If you have SMRSH on your system and want to be able to use this module to create autoreply or filter aliases, this field must be set to the SMRSH directory. This tells the module to create a symlink from that directory to the autoreply or filter script that it generates, so that they can actually be run. If None is selected, no such links will be created. Many Linux distributions include a Sendmail package that uses SMRSH. On those systems, this field will be set to /etc/smrsh by default. |
| Extra mail queue directories | This field can be used to specify extra mail queue directories for the module to check for queued messages that are not defined in the sendmail.cf file. This is rarely necessary unless you have two separate Sendmail configurations—one for incoming mail and one for outgoing. In this case, the module can only read one of the configuration files and so will not be able to automatically work out all the queue directories. Because recent versions of Mandrake Linux include Sendmail packages that work like this, the field will be set correctly by default on that distribution. |
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