Sendmail installed? - Setting new users and checking emails?

[Dan_MailLists]

> PLEASE bottom-post on this list.  It makes following the thread SO much
> easier.
>
> First, to find where your "rpm" is, try "which rpm".  It should be in
> /bin.
>
> Second, sendmail can be installed in several different places.  The
> normal place is /usr/sbin.  It could be in /usr/lib or /usr/bin.  If you
> find it in /usr/lib, it could be either the real binary or a symlink to
> the real binary.  "ls -l /usr/lib/sendmail" should show you the
> destination of the link.
>
> Third, to check a user's account, you can do an SMTP dialog to the box:
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------------
> # telnet mailserver.domain.tld 25 <--- YOU ENTER THIS
> Trying xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx...
> Connected to mailserver.domain.tld (xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx).
> Escape character is '^]'.
> 220 mailserver.domain.tld ESMTP sendmail MTA; Mon, 24 May 2004 10:38:19
> -0700
> helo myhost.mydomain.tld <--- YOU ENTER THIS
> 250 mailserver.domain.tld Hello myhost.mydomain.tld [xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx],
> pleased to meet you
> mail from: someone at somedomain.com <--- YOU ENTER THIS
> 250 2.1.0 someone at somedomain.com... Sender ok
> rcpt to: recipient at recipdomain.tld <--- YOU ENTER THIS
> 250 2.1.5 recipient at recipdomain.tld... Recipient ok
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> quit <--- YOU ENTER THIS
> 221 2.0.0 mxin-01-001.root-mail.com closing connection
> Connection closed by foreign host.
> -----------------------------------------------------------------
>
> If the "rcpt to:" thing gets a "Recipient ok" response (shown above the
> "^^^^^^^^" line), then the account is there.
>

Yep, I'll bottom post from now on.

I've tried 'which rpm' and it returns nothing at all. To verify, I also
tried 'which vi' which gave me the path to vi.
'which sendmail' also returned nothing at all.
'which mail' comes back with /usr/bin/mail if that's any help?

'ls -l /usr/lib/sendmail' tells me this -
 /usr/lib/sendmail -> /usr/sbin/ssmtp
which I guess means that sendmail points to that file in /usr/sbin/ ?

Thanks for that Telnet dialog example, I'll hang onto that for future ref as
it looks pretty useful.

Anyway, I'm getting the impression that as I chose a managed server they've
deliberately hidden things from me, and fair enough. Also, I never made it
clear to you guys what I was trying to do: I'm coding some newsletter
scripts to run from crontab, pick up data from a MySQL db and pump out
newsletters via a PHP script (using the CGI version of PHP4). I wanted to
set up some sort of test account to receive thousands of emails, and I
thought it would be best dealt with on the server.
Instead, I'm now going to send out most of the emails to known bad
addresses, and every so often send one to a real address of my own. The
theory being that if I get all I'm expecting to, then I'll know that all of
the emails were sent. This is all to get an idea of what the server can
handle.

So, I've got a PHP script running from crontab and sending out emails, I
haven't connected it to a db yet, but I don't think that'll cause any grief.

So despite the fact I can't directly run sendmail from the command line, I
can get it working as I need it to, so I'll leave it at that for now, unless
of course anything I've said leads you guys to think there's something
seriously wrong with this server config of course!?

Thanks for the time you took to look into this!

I'm sure I'll be back soon to mither you some more....

Cheers,
Dan