.TH qmail-start 8
.SH NAME
qmail-start \- turn on mail delivery
.SH SYNOPSIS
.B qmail-start
[
.I defaultdelivery
[
.I logger arg ...
]
]
.SH DESCRIPTION
.B qmail-start
invokes
.BR qmail-send ,
.BR qmail-lspawn ,
.BR qmail-rspawn ,
and
.BR qmail-clean ,
under the proper uids and gids.
These four daemons cooperate to deliver messages from the queue.

.B qmail-start
arranges for
.BR qmail-send 's
activity record to be sent to
.BR qmail-start 's
output.
See
.B qmail-log(5)
for the format of the activity record.
Other than this,
.B qmail-start
does not print anything, even on failure.

If
.I defaultdelivery
is supplied,
.B qmail-start
passes it to
.BR qmail-lspawn .

If
.I logger
is supplied,
.B qmail-start
invokes
.I logger
with the given arguments,
and feeds
.BR qmail-send 's
activity record through
.IR logger .

Environment variables given to
.B qmail-start
will eventually be passed on to
.BR qmail-local ,
so make sure to clean up the environment if you run
.B qmail-start
manually:

.EX
   # env - PATH="/var/lib/qmail/bin:$PATH"
.br
   qmail-start ./Mailbox splogger qmail &
.br
   (all on one line)
.EE

Resource limits, controlling ttys, et al. are also passed from
.B qmail-start
to
.BR qmail-local .

Note that
.B qmail-send
normally juggles several simultaneous deliveries.
To reduce
.BR qmail-send 's
impact on other programs,
you can run
.B qmail-start
with a low priority.
.SH "SEE ALSO"
logger(1),
splogger(1),
nice(1),
qmail-log(5),
qmail-local(8),
qmail-clean(8),
qmail-lspawn(8),
qmail-rspawn(8),
qmail-send(8)