I'm upgrading some servers from rh7.3 -> CentOS 3 and have several scripts that use "mail" to relay messages to my mail server.
Am I correct on the assumption that you now have to have sendmail running to use mail, where as previously you did not? Or am I missing something?
You're missing something. mail has always injected to the local MTA to handle.
Ok, I'm no mail[x]/sendmail expert, But the "DEFAULT" installation of mail[x]/sendmail WILL NOT work unless you start sendmail. It used to work without starting sendmail, but not anymore.
Somewhere between sendmail 8.11 and 8.12 things have changed, local mail sent, now gets put into the "/var/spool/clientmqueue" and will remain there until sendmail's "Client Queue Runner" comes around to process it.
[root@cpq380-2 spool]# ps -A -fw | grep sendmail
root 3822 1 0 13:26 ? 00:00:00 sendmail: accepting connections
smmsp 3831 1 0 13:26 ? 00:00:00 sendmail: Queue runner@01:00:00 for /var/spool/clientmqueue
Now if there's a way to change the "default" behavior back, through a config change or sendmail param, I'm all ears?