Skip to content

Starting KumoMTA

Once KumoMTA has been installed and an initial policy script is in place, the server can be started with the following command:

$ sudo systemctl start kumomta

It can be enabled as a service with:

$ sudo systemctl enable kumomta

You can check the status with:

$ sudo systemctl status kumomta

It can also be started manually with:

$ sudo /opt/kumomta/sbin/kumod \
    --policy /opt/kumomta/etc/policy/init.lua \
    --user kumod
  • Using sudo allows it to run as a privileged user so it can access port 25 which is needed to send and receive from most MTAs.
  • The daemon kumod is the MTA
  • The directive --policy makes kumod load the 'init.lua' file as configuration policy.
  • The --user directive allows the server to drop privileges after attaching to port 25 so that it does not continue to run as root.

For more detailed output, prepend KUMOD_LOG=kumod=info (or debug for even more detail):

$ sudo KUMOD_LOG=kumod=info /opt/kumomta/sbin/kumod \
   --policy /opt/kumomta/etc/policy/init.lua --user kumod

If all goes well, it should return a PID and drop you back to a Linux prompt.

If KumoMTA does not start, refer to the Troubleshooting Page of the User Guide.

NOTE that if you are also planning to use the TSA shaping service, you should enable that as well:

$ sudo systemctl start kumo-tsa-daemon

It can be enabled as a service with:

$ sudo systemctl enable kumo-tsa-daemon

You can check the status with:

$ sudo systemctl status kumo-tsa-daemon