Miscellaneous config Options

There are quite a number of options you may set in the config file, which, although useful, are not essential to running smail, and which we will not discuss here. Instead, we will only mention a few that you might find a reason to use:

error copy postmaster

If this boolean variable is set, any error will generate a message to the postmaster. Usually, this is only done for errors that are due to a faulty configuration. The variable can be turned on by putting it in the config file, preceded by a plus (+).

max hop count

If the hop count for a message (i.e. the number of hosts already traversed) equals or exceeds this number, attempts at remote delivery will result in an error message being returned to the sender. This is used to prevent messages from looping forever. The hop count is generally computed from the number of Received: fields in the mail header, but may also be set manually using the -h option on the command line.

This variable defaults to 20.

postmaster

The postmaster's address. If the address Postmaster cannot be resolved to a valid local address, then this is used as the last resort. The default is root.