With the addition of submit.cf, the following functional changes have occurred:
In version 8.12 of sendmail, only root can run the mail queue. For further details, refer to the changes that are described in the mailq(1) man page. For new task information, refer to Administering the Queue Directories (Task Map).
The mail-submission program mode runs without root privilege, which might prevent sendmail from having access to certain files (such as the .forward files). Therefore, the -bv option for sendmail could give the user misleading output. No workaround is available.
Prior to sendmail version 8.12, if you were not running the sendmail daemon (that is, running in daemon mode), you would only prevent the delivery of inbound mail. Now, in sendmail version 8.12, if you are not running the sendmail daemon with the default configuration, you also prevent the delivery of outbound mail. The client queue runner (also known as the mail submission program) must be able to submit mail to the daemon on the local SMTP port. If the client queue runner tries to open an SMTP session with the local host and the daemon is not listening on the SMTP port, the mail remains in the queue. The default configuration does run a daemon, so this problem does not occur if you are using the default configuration. However, if you have disabled your daemon, refer to Managing Mail Delivery by Using an Alternate Configuration (Task) for a way to resolve this problem.