On Fri, Jan 10, 2003 at 10:23:04AM +0100, Niklas Saers Mailinglistaccount wrote:
> Hi, I just recently installed 4.7-mini.iso on a server, cvs'd STABLE src,
> made world, kernel, and did a mergemaster. But from the moment the
> computer was up, sendmail has sent messages such as:
>
> Jan 10 10:10:10 ns2 sendmail[231]: h0A9I5om000231: Loosing
> ./qfh0A9I5om000231: savemail panic
> Jan 10 10:10:10 ns2 sendmail[231]: SYSERR(root): savemail: cannot save
> rejected email anywhere
>
> First off all, the saving should be trivial, /var/spool/mqueue looks
> like it should by default. Second of all: emailing myself using 'mail'
> works perfectly. Any clues?
This is sendmail trying and failing to do final delivery on a message.
It does that by passing the message off to a delivery agent like
mail.local or procmail. If the delivery agent comes back with a
permanent error code sendmail will generally bounce the message back
to the sender. However if that is impossible --- often because the
failing message is already a bounce-o-gramme --- then sendmail is
stuck with an undeliverable message. It could just leave the message
in the queue, but that could eventually lead to wasting a lot of disk
space and CPU cycles retrying the delivery every time it runs the
queue.
For messages originating from a user on the same host sendmail's last
resort is to save the message to the sender's ${HOME}/dead.letter
file, but that is generally not possible for stuff like the
periodic(8) nightly status reports and so forth. That's when you get
the situation shown in your log files.
One step that will help reduce almost all of this sort of thing is to
make sure that you've set up the /etc/mail/aliases file so that you
have '[EMAIL PROTECTED]' and '[EMAIL PROTECTED]' addresses
that work. [This isn't just a good idea: all Internet connected mail
servers are required to provide those addresses by the SMTP RFCs] On
FreeBSD, by default, postmaster@ and MAILER-DAEMON@ are ultimately
aliased to root@, and you should generally set up an alias for root@
to send root's e-mail to the administrator of the machine: eg.
root: niklas
(remember to run 'newaliases' if you alter the aliases file)
In this sort of case, postmaster@ will receive a bounce-o-gramme for
any failing message originating from your site, and there's usually
sufficient information in there to make it obvious what has gone
wrong.
Cheers,
Matthew
--
Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil. 26 The Paddocks
Savill Way
PGP: http://www.infracaninophile.co.uk/pgpkey Marlow
Tel: +44 1628 476614 Bucks., SL7 1TH UK
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