Lines in the sendmail.mc file that begin with the # character are not parsed by m4, and will by default be output directly into the sendmail.cf file. This is useful if you want to comment on what your configuration is doing in both the input and output files.

To allow comments in your sendmail.mc that are not placed into the sendmail.cf, you can use the m4 divert and dnl tokens. divert(-1) will cause all output to cease. divert(0) will cause output to be restored to the default. Any output generated by lines between these will be discarded. In our example, we’ve used this mechanism to provide a comment that appears only in the sendmail.mc file. To achieve the same result for a single line, you can use the dnl token that means, literally, “starting at the beginning of the next line, delete all characters up to and including the next newline.” We’ve used this in our example, too.

These are standard m4 features, and you can obtain more information on them from its manual page.

VERSIONID(`@(#)sendmail.mc  8.9 (Linux) 01/10/98')

The VERSIONID macro is optional, but is useful to record the version of the sendmail configuration in the sendmail.cf file. So you’ll often encounter it, and we recommend it. In any case, be sure to include:

OSTYPE(`linux')

This is probably the most important definition. The OSTYPE macro causes a file of definitions to be included that are good defaults for your operating system. Most of the definitions in an OSTYPE macro file set the pathnames of various configuration files, mailer program paths and arguments, and the location of directories sendmail uses to store messages. The standard sendmail source code release includes such a file for Linux, which would be included by the previous example. Some Linux distributions, notably the Debian distribution, include their own definition file that is completely Linux-FHS compliant. When your distribution does this, you should probably use its definition instead of the Linux default one.

The OSTYPE definition should be one of the first definitions to appear in your sendmail.mc file, as many other definitions depend upon it.

The DOMAIN macro is useful when you wish to configure a large number of machines on the same network in a standard way. It you’re configuring a small number of hosts, it probably isn’t worth bothering with. You typically configure items, such as the name of mail relay hosts or hubs that all hosts on your network will use.

The standard installation contains a directory of m4 macro templates used to drive the configuration process. This directory is usually named /usr/share/sendmail.cf or something similar. Here you will find a subdirectory called domain that contains domain-specific configuration templates. To make use of the DOMAIN macro, you must create your own macro file containing the standard definitions you require for your site, and write it into the domain subdirectory. You’d normally include only the macro definitions that were unique to your domain here, such as smart host definitions or relay hosts, but you are not limited to these.

The sendmail source distribution comes with a number of sample domain macro files that you can use to model your own.

If you saved your domain macro file as /usr/share/sendmail.cf/domain/vbrew.m4, you’d include definitions in your sendmail.mc using:

DOMAIN(`vbrew')

The FEATURE macro enables you to include predefined sendmail features in your configuration. These sendmail features make the supported configurations very simple to use. There are a large number, and throughout this chapter we’ll talk about only a few of the more useful and important ones. You can find full details of the features available in the CF file included in the source package.

To use any of the features listed, you should include a line in your sendmail.mc that looks like:

FEATURE(name)

where name is substituted with the feature name. Some features take one optional parameter. If you wish to use something other than the default, you should use an entry that looks like:

FEATURE(name, param)

where param is the parameter to supply.

The standard sendmail macro configuration files provide lots of hooks and variables with which you can customize your configuration. These are called local macro definitions. Many of them are listed in the CF file in the sendmail source package.

The local macro definitions are usually invoked by supplying the name of the macro with an argument representing the value you wish to assign to the variable the macro manages. Again, we’ll explore some of the more common local macro definitions in the examples we present later in the chapter.

If you want sendmail to transport mail in any way other than by local delivery, you must tell it which transports to use. The MAILER macro makes this very easy. The current version of sendmail supports a variety of mail transport protocols; some of these are experimental, others are probably rarely used.

In our network we need the SMTP transport to send and receive mail among the hosts on our local area network, and the UUCP transport to send and receive mail from our smart host. To achieve this, we simply include both the smtp and uucp mail transports. The local mail transport is included by default, but may be defined for clarity, if you wish. If you are including both the smtp and the uucp mailers in your configuration, you must always be sure to define the smtp mailer first.

The more commonly used transports available to you using the MAILER macro are described in the following list:

There are others, such as the pop, procmail, mail11, phquery, and cyrus that are useful, but less common. If your curiosity is piqued, you can read about these in the sendmail book or the documentation supplied in the source package.

The Virtual Brewery’s configuration is probably more complex than most sites require. Most sites today would use the SMTP transport only and do not have to deal with UUCP at all. In our configuration we’ve configured a “smart host” that is used to handle all outgoing mail. Since we are using the SMTP transport on our local network we must tell sendmail that it is not to send local mail via the smart host. The LOCAL_NET_CONFIG macro allows you to insert sendmail rules directly into the output sendmail.cf to modify the way that local mail is handled. We’ll talk more about rewrite rules later on, but for the moment you should accept that the rule we’ve supplied in our example specifies that any mail destined for hosts in the vbrew.com domain should be delivered directly to the target hosts using the SMTP mail transport.