Scroll to navigation

() ()
System Administration Commands etrn(8)

NAME
etrn - start mail queue run

SYNOPSIS
etrn [-v] server-host [client-hosts]

DESCRIPTION
SMTP's ETRN command allows an SMTP client and server to
interact, giving the server an opportunity to start the pro­
cessing of its queues for messages to go to a given host.
This is meant to be used in start-up conditions, as well as
for mail nodes that have transient connections to their ser­
vice providers.


The etrn utility initiates an SMTP session with the host
server-host and sends one or more ETRN commands as follows:
If no client-hosts are specified, etrn looks up every host
name for which sendmail(1M) accepts email and, for each
name, sends an ETRN command with that name as the argument.
If any client-hosts are specified, etrn uses each of these
as arguments for successive ETRN commands.

OPTIONS
The following option is supported:


-v The normal mode of operation for etrn is to do all of its work silently. The -v option makes it verbose, which causes etrn to display its conversations with the remote SMTP server.

ENVIRONMENT
No environment variables are used.

FILES
/etc/mail/sendmail.cf sendmail configuration file

SEE ALSO
sendmail(1M), RFC 1985.

CAVEATS
Not all SMTP servers support ETRN.

CREDITS
Leveraged from David Muir Sharnoff's expn.pl script. Chris­
tian von Roques added support for args and fixed a couple of
bugs.

AVAILABILITY
The latest version of etrn is available in the contrib
directory of the sendmail distribution through anonymous ftp
at ftp://ftp.sendmail.org/ucb/src/sendmail/.

AUTHOR
John T. Beck <john@beck.org>