| qmail-start(8) | System Manager's Manual | qmail-start(8) |
qmail-start - turn on mail delivery
qmail-start [ defaultdelivery [ logger arg ... ] ]
qmail-start invokes qmail-send, qmail-lspawn, qmail-rspawn, and qmail-clean, under the proper uids and gids. These four daemons cooperate to deliver messages from the queue.
qmail-start arranges for qmail-send's activity record to be sent to qmail-start's output. See qmail-log(5) for the format of the activity record. Other than this, qmail-start does not print anything, even on failure.
If defaultdelivery is supplied, qmail-start passes it to qmail-lspawn.
If logger is supplied, qmail-start invokes logger with the given arguments, and feeds qmail-send's activity record through logger.
Environment variables given to qmail-start will eventually be passed on to qmail-local, so make sure to clean up the environment if you run qmail-start manually:
# env - PATH="/var/lib/qmail/bin:$PATH"
qmail-start ./Mailbox splogger qmail &
(all on one line)
Resource limits, controlling ttys, et al. are also passed from qmail-start to qmail-local.
Note that qmail-send normally juggles several simultaneous deliveries. To reduce qmail-send's impact on other programs, you can run qmail-start with a low priority.
logger(1), splogger(1), nice(1), qmail-log(5), qmail-local(8), qmail-clean(8), qmail-lspawn(8), qmail-rspawn(8), qmail-send(8)