The Transcript File: xf
A given mail message can be destined for many recipients, requiring different delivery agents. During the process of delivery, error messages (such as “User unknown” and “Permission denied”) can be printed back to sendmail by each delivery agent.
While calling the necessary delivery agents,
sendmail saves all the error
messages it receives in a temporary file. The name
of that temporary file begins with the letters
xf. After all
delivery agents have been called,
sendmail returns any
collected error messages to the sender and deletes
the temporary xf
file. If there are no errors, the empty xf file is silently
deleted. A -d51.104 debugging switch setting can
be used to prevent deletion of the xf file.
See Using qf, df, and xf Subdirectories on page 403 for a way to relocate xf files to a
memory-based filesystem.
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