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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.

Last update: 2023-10-20
Created: 2023-03-13