qmail-start (8)

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)