debian man page for etrn

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>