[comp.mail.sendmail] Novice administrator needs help installing smail

cwright@jjmhome.UUCP (Charles R. Wright cwright) (08/09/90)

I am trying to set up my site to get newsfeeds and mail over the phone lines
(whatever the official name for that is).  I have installed smail V2.5 to the
best of my ability.  I am not sure if the configuration specified was correct:

Host name: zippy, Official domain: UUCP, SMTP connections: yes,
Local mail delivery by /usr/lib/sendmail (a Berkeley mailer, yes?).

These were some of the things the make.cf.sh file wanted to know.

With everything installed per the instructions that came with smail, sending
mail to anyone now causes the mailer (sendmail, I guess) to "run amok".  What
I think happens is that sendmail invokes a daemon which dies quickly and
somehow another daemon starts.  All this happens so quickly that doing a "ps"
command shows as many as 5 "(mail)" daemons running.  I then have to reboot the
machine after moving /etc/sendmail.cf somewhere else.  Examination of the mail
queue reveals numerous queued files.  If I let this thing run long enough, I
get a message that says something to the effect of "too many hops (30)".

Questions:

1)  Am I doing something incredibly stupid but easy to fix, or is this really
    difficult?

2)  Do I really need smail at all?  One person suggested that I could config.
    sendmail to deliver uucp mail.  It was suggested that since I am forwarding
    all my mail through one site only, smail was overkill.  I would prefer the
    flexibility of smail in case at some point in the future we want to send
    to other hosts as well.

Thanks in advance for any help.

Charles R. Wright
wright@edcd.gte.com, or through return mail.