[Rainy Day]

I've got a sendmail daemon running which thinks it needs to tell me about every SPAM it bounces, just like a proud cat which shows you every critter it catches. I've turned off certain eMail addresses in my domain space (from the virtual user table) because those addresses receive hundreds of SPAM's each day. Unfortunately, whenever i connect to the server as root and an eMail arrives for a closed down account, i get a message like this on my screen:

Apr 24 16:20 mailserv sm-mta[7163]: h3ONKktE007163: <spam@mydomain.com>... User unknown

I also get a similar entry in the log file. I definitely don't want to see it on my screen, and i'd just as soon not even have the entry in my log file. As far as i'm concerned, those addresses don't exist and i want sendmail to deal with them as quietly as possible.

I thought that setting ErrorMode=q (aka define(`confERROR_MODE', `q')dnl) would cause it to throw away the error message, but i guess it just applies to locally originated mail and not to mail coming in from the outside.

I'm using a command like this to start up the daemon:

sendmail -L sm-mta -bd -q30m >/dev/null 2>/dev/null &amp;

I should think there must be some kind of configuration option to handle this, but i'll be danged if i can find it. Anybody know how to tame sendmail?

Signed,
Desperately seeking tranquility on the console

[Rainy Day]

To answer my own question:

The messages are sent to user root (and to the console) by syslogd and may be silenced by a modification to syslog.conf (and restarting syslogd). The offending line, which may be commented out, was:

Code:
*.notice;auth.debug					root

Please note that if you make this change, other messages (besides just sendmail originated) may also be suppressed, and this may be undesirable. YMMV. Please read man syslog and man syslog.conf before making changes.

Edit: Changing the line above to:

Code:
*.warning;auth.debug					root

seems to do the trick just fine, and would have fewer side effects than commenting it out completely.