Setting up and maintaining an electronic mail service involves complex tasks that are critical to the daily operation of your network. As a network administrator, you might need to expand an existing mail service or set up a mail service on a new network or a subnet. Oracle Solaris uses a mail transfer agent called sendmail to handle mail services such as aliasing and forwarding.
This chapter describes the features of sendmail, and the differences between the Oracle Solaris version of sendmail and the generic Berkeley version. The chapter also provides an introduction to the various hardware and software components used for sendmail.