OpenSMTPD is a FREE implementation of the server-side SMTP protocol as defined by RFC 5321, with some additional standard extensions. It allows ordinary machines to exchange e-mails with other systems speaking the SMTP protocol. You must have smtpd and smtpq users and groups on the system for privilege separation - something like this should suffice: groupadd -g 270 smtpd useradd -u 270 -g 270 -r -s /bin/false -d /var/empty smtpd groupadd -g 271 smtpq useradd -u 271 -g 271 -r -s /bin/false -d /var/empty smtpq You will want to add /etc/rc.d/rc.opensmtpd to rc.local so that it will start on boot (or perhaps consider symlinking rc.sendmail to rc.opensmtpd). This package conflicts with the stock sendmail package included in Slackware and overwrites some of its files, so remove the sendmail package before installing opensmtpd. Alpine hangs when sending mail using the opensmtp sendmail command and the opensmtpd server is down. To prevent this, modify the /etc/pine.conf or the user .pinerc to send the mail directly to the server instead of using the opensmtpd sendmail command: smtp-server=localhost