[Chapter 4] 4.4 Things to Try
Author: Bryan Costales & Eric Allman
Date: 1999-01-06T18:33:36Z

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| Chapter 4 How to Run sendmail |

## 4.4 Things to Try

- If you have access to two machines, kill the sendmail daemon on one, then send mail to that machine from the other using the `-v` (verbose) switch. What does this tell you about why it is important to always re\%start the daemon after you have killed it? How can you tell that a remote sendmail daemon has died?

- Using the `-v` switch, send mail to yourself. In the message body, include nothing but lines that begin with dots. Does the message get through intact?

- Begin forming the habit of routinely running mailq several times per day. Start to learn the many reasons that mail is queued rather than sent.

- Write a shell script that runs sendmail with the `-bv` (verify) switch to determine whether every alias in the aliases(5) file is good and print those that aren't. Be sure to filter the output so that good addresses (those marked as `deliverable`) are not printed.

- Read the online manuals for all the MUAs on your system, such as that for /usr/ucb/Mail. For which MUAs is it possible to indirectly run sendmail in verbose mode? That is, which will pass a `-v` command-line switch through to sendmail?

4.3 Debugging (-d) |  | 5. The sendmail.cf File