On Tue, 18 May 1999, Ray Olszewski wrote:
> Your questions are about a variety of e-mail problems. I want here to
limit
> myself to your sendmail problems, though.
The basic sending function is resolved. But I'll go ahead an answer in
case you have some additional comments as I still have much to learn
about all this. Thanks for asking.
> First, a basic question: what distribution and verision of Linux are you
> using, and what version of sendmail?
RH 5.2 sendmail is 8.8.7 I think -- the one that comes with 5.2
> Second, another basic question: what message or result occurs when you TRY
> to send mail? How do you know that it isn't being sent? (I'm not questioning
> the accuracy of your report, but the actual, EXACT error or report you are
> getting can help with diagnosis.)
Turned out that, as I suspected, sendmail wasn't the basic problem. (No
wonder it didn't resolve by trying to figure out how sendmail works.)
The situation was resolved by eliminating my isp's smtp address from the
mail server field in pine setup. Michael Traush had advised me to do this.
Message I was getting by tying sendmail was "<user-id> .... Recipient
names must be specified." Also, I could not send from pine.
It STILL saying that when I type sendmail at the command line even though
I am able to send. There are 2 "unresolvable" messages still in queue from
before.
> Third, what customizing did you do to sendmail?
nothing to sendmail.cf or .cw Added one alias as I saw in a document
somewhere to aliases -- <username>: mail
It didn't help. That's all.
Out of the box, it will try
> to make a direct connection to the destination host for a message (actually,
> to the mail relay specified in the host's MX record), not relay through your
> ISP or any other relay. You can set up sendmail.cf to force sendmail to use
> an SMTP relay, but if you didn't, sendmail isn't doing so on its own. Your
> pop3 setup will not change this.
>
> Fourth, are you running sendmail in daemon mode? (If you do a "ps -ax" do
> you see an entry something like "sendmail: accepting connections on port
> 25"?)
Yes! it's there! Is this how to list running daemons?
You DON'T need this running to send mail out as such, but you do need
> it to check the queue of unsent messages periodically (typically every 15 or
> 30 minutes).
I don't know how to set it up to do so or how to determine what daemons
are running. top and ps do not seem to list daemons. (At least neither
shows fetchmail when IT is running in daemon mode.)
I didn't do anything to cause sendmail to run in daemon mode. So I don't
know if it is. OTOH, I don't seem to need it for using pine because I just
use the send to terminate a message and now, happily, it goes.
> Fifth, what does the queue of unsent messages look like? To find out, run
> "mailq". Are your unsent messages sitting in the queue or have they vanished.
There are 2 still there. "unresolvable" though the to: addresses are
correct. The from: address however is <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>...
unresolvable.
> Sixth, and related to number 3 above, is it possible that your ISP will not
> pass port-25 connections through to their destinations? This is a wild guess
> -- I've never encountered such a block before -- but I suppose it is
> possible. Are there any connection reports (success or failure) from
> sendmail in your logs (/var/log/messages, /var/log/debug, or wherever you
> have syslogd logging the relevant messages)?
I didn't set anything up for this. There are some files (5 called
messages.*) in /var/log How do I tell which are for sendmail? The only
sendmail file -- sendmail.st -- is in binary form.
> About your question on SMTP and passwords -- SMTP isn't password based. SMTP
> relays (up-to-date ones, anyway) decide whether to relay a message based on
> relay rules, which usually involve checking that either the origin or the
> destination for the message is within the domain served by the host. You
> supply a password only for the pop3 host (under Linux, through fetchmail).
thanks.
> If you really want to "learn" sendmail, you should get the O'Reilly "bat"
> book on sendmail.
Yes. It might be a good thing to get when I get around to using some of
its added features such as setting up an auto-sponder.
> As to which SMTP server you use, choosing "localhost" tells the app
> (Netscape in your case, if I follow your posting) to use sendmail on the
> same host as your MTA (Mail Transport Agent).
Yes -- I'm using that in pine now. Haven't tried it in netscape which I'm
also using.
Does netscape use sendmail? Maybe I should try localhost for the smtp
server there.
Do you know a document where I can learn the difference between how pop3
and imap work? I know imap is for reading messages on a server. But since
fetchmail is d/l'ing them I don't see much difference between using it and
pop3.
Anyway, thanks,
Jamie Faunt
