Sendmail, 3rd Edition

Name

DeliveryMode

Synopsis

sendmail can use four modes for delivering mail. Three have always been a part of sendmail: background, interactive, and queue-only. The deferred mode has been added under V8.7 and later sendmail.

The mode is selected with the DeliveryMode option:

O DeliveryMode=mode            ← configuration file (V8.7 and later) 
-ODeliveryMode=mode            ← command line (V8.7 and later) 
define(`confDELIVERY_MODE',mode)   ← mc configuration (V8.7 and later) 
Odmode                         ← configuration file (deprecated) 
-odmode← command line (deprecated) 

The mode argument is of type character. It is case-sensitive (must be lowercase) and is selected from one of the keywords shown in Table 24-16. Only the first letter of each is recognized, but we recommend full words for improved clarity.

Table 24-16. DeliveryMode option keywords

Keyword	§	Description
background	See this section	Background (asynchronous) delivery
deferred	See this section	Deferred (held as is) delivery (V8.7 and later)
interactive	See this section	Interactive (synchronous) delivery
queueonly	See this section	Queued (held but processed) delivery

If the mode argument is missing, this option defaults to the i or interactive mode. If the entire DeliveryMode option is missing, V8 sendmail defaults to background mode, but old sendmail behaves unpredictably; consequently, this option should be considered mandatory. The default for the mc configuration is also background.

If the mode character is anything other than the first lowercase ...