With sendmail-8.14.1-4.1.fc8 and initscripts-8.56-1, "service sendmail stop" doesn't. The culprit appears to be this section of code in /etc/rc.d/init.d/sendmail: stop) [ $running -ne 0 ] || exit 0 stop RETVAL=$? ;; I believe it should say "&& exit 0" rather than "|| exit 0".
Fixed in rawhide in package sendmail-8.14.1-4.2.