On Wednesday 03 July 2013 15:57:31 Sergey Poznyakoff did opine: > Hi Gene, > > There were quite a few mails in the list recently which my schedule > did not permit me to attend in time, for which I apologize. > > > So, now, how do I troubleshoot what your /usr/bin/mail is actually > > doing with my pecks on the keyboard? Does it keep a logfile > > someplace? > > First of all, let's verify that the binary we are talking about is > really the mail utility from mailutils (Debian succeded in making such > a mess of UNUX that one can never be sure what binary one is running). > So, the first step is to try "mail --version". If it shows "GNU > Mailutils", then we're at home. Note, however, what version number > it shows. That might be important. > root@coyote:/etc# mail --version mail (GNU Mailutils 2.1)
> The mailutils implementation of bin/mail never tries to deliver mails > directly. Instead it uses a transport layer (a "mailer"), which is > configured via the variable "sendmail" (a misnomer, I readily agree). Humm, sendmail is not installed, but is being installed, while that is removing postfix. I thought sendmail was part of every distro? I have aklso heard that postfix can do the same exact job. If this fixes it, then obviously postfix is not a universal replacement. Sigh... > Its default value instructs mail to invoke "/usr/sbin/sendmail > -t -oi" and to pipe the composed message to its standard input. This > variable may be redefined either in the site-wide configuration file > /etc/mail.rc or in the user configuration file ~/.mailrc. That file DID exist in /etc, an hour ago. With the postfix removal it seems to have been removed. > You can > always check its value by running "set" without arguments from the mail > shell, or by running > > mail -E set </dev/null|grep ^sendmail As root: root@coyote:/etc# mail -E set </dev/null|grep ^sendmail sendmail="sendmail:/usr/sbin/sendmail" As gene: gene@coyote:~$ mail -E set </dev/null|grep ^sendmail sendmail="sendmail:/usr/sbin/sendmail" No diff there. > To see what is going on when mail is invoked, set the variable > "verbose" to true. To do so, add the following line to either > configroot@coyote:/etc# mail -E set </dev/null|grep ^sendmail > set verbose > > or use the option -E "set verbose" when invoking mail, e.g. > > mail -E "set verbose" [email protected] And, with sendmail installed, I was able to send me a message using the above syntax, Yippee! debug output was: gene@coyote:~$ mail -E "set verbose" [email protected] Cc: Subject: Third test of local mail delivery sent to me as me Now is the time yadda yadda DEBUG: sendmail (/usr/sbin/sendmail) DEBUG: exec /usr/sbin/sendmail argv: /usr/sbin/sendmail -oi -t DEBUG: Sending headers... DEBUG: Header: To: <[email protected]> DEBUG: Header: Subject: Third test of local mail delivery sent to me as me DEBUG: Header: X-Mailer: mail (GNU Mailutils 2.1) DEBUG: Header: DEBUG: Sending body... DEBUG: /usr/sbin/sendmail exited with: 0 Which looks fairly normal to me. It looks as if sendmail was the magic twanger. So from root, su - amanda, and send another msg, works just as well. I think we've pieced this puzzle together now. Thank you very much Sergey, Jordi and everybody. Cheers, Gene -- "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) My web page: <http://coyoteden.dyndns-free.com:85/gene> is up! My views <http://www.armchairpatriot.com/What%20Has%20America%20Become.shtml> Oh no, not again. -- Manoj Srivastava A pen in the hand of this president is far more dangerous than 200 million guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens. _______________________________________________ Bug-mailutils mailing list [email protected] https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-mailutils
