mail command

Rick Stevens rstevens at vitalstream.com
Tue May 3 21:43:42 UTC 2005


Chris Hewitt wrote:
> On Mon, 2005-05-02 at 22:43, wang wrote:
> 
>>Thank you Chris,
>>
>>
>>>If is used to work, then something has changed to make it not work. So
>>>the question is what have you changed since it did work?
>>
>>I don't think I changed something. It jsut suddenly stopped working.
> 
> 
> Something has changed. Things don't just stop. It may not be you that
> made a change. What changed between when it used to work and when you
> first noticed it did not? Upgrade, firewall, configure something etc.
> 
> 
>>>Does it send mail locally, e.g.:
>>>mail root at localhost -s test
>>>text here
>>>.
> 
> 
> Did you try this test, to send mail locally? It will help to pin down
> whether the problem is on your computer or with sending to your mail
> server (which I assume is a different computer).
> 
> 
>>when I only type the mail command with out any option,
>>It says,
>>
>>No mail for root
> 
> 
> The mail program will also read mail. Typing it without parameters is to
> read mail. This message just tells you that root does  not have any
> mail. That is unusual, do you redirect roots mail to another user?
> 
>>>Assuming sendmail is your MTA, is it running? At the prompt
>>>([chris at amdk63 chris]$ is my prompt), if you  do:
>>>[chris at amdk63 chris]$ ps ax|grep sendmail
>>> 3056 ?        S      0:00 /usr/sbin/sendmail -bd -q1h
>>> 2200 pts/0    S      0:00 grep sendmail
>>>[chris at amdk63 chris]$
>>
>>when I try the same command, the system answer is,
>>
>>smmsp      764  0.0  0.0  3404 1420 ?        S    Apr22   0:00 [sendmail]
>>root     21056  0.0  0.0  4572  660 pts/1    S    14:15   0:00 grep sendmail
> 
> 
> I'm not sure about the sendmail in brackets, anyone?

It means it's a detached process.

> After trying to send mail locally, is the mail received by the user?
> What is in the log file (for sendmail typically /var/log/maillog)?

It sure looks like sendmail pooped out on your machine.  I'd try a
"service sendmail restart" and verify that it comes up.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
-                                                                    -
-     There are only 10 kinds of people in the world -- those who    -
-                 understand binary and those who don't              -
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