RE: Mail not sending

[Steve <steve focb co nz>]

The way redhat 8 onwards were setup - sendmail was set to listen on 
localhost only by default (to minimise security problems) and the "mail" 
(/bin/mail) client was set to relay mail via localhost and let the 
delivery daemon deal with it. This has advantages (more seemless 
intergration with different MTA's etc) but will produce the error you are 
seeing is the sendmail daemon is not running for any reason.

You can change the sendmail.cf and associated files such that this 
behaviour no longer happens tho I havent bothered to look into how to do 
this and it may be more effort than it's worth.

The hint here was the message "connection refused" which tends to indicate 
that you have turned off the sendmail daemon and hence no connection to 
localhost on port 25 can be established (this can also be the result of 
firewall rules)

I'd suggest you turn your sendmail daemon back on..

-- 
Steve.

On Mon, 2 Feb 2004, Christian Campbell wrote:

> > > I'm trying to send mail from my RH8.0 box.The server I am 
> > sending to is on
> > > my LAN.  I've run tcpdump on the box that is sending the 
> > mail, and I can't
> > > see that's it's making any attempt to send any mail.  I can 
> > telnet to the
> > > mail server on port 25 with no problem (and can see that 
> > through tcpdump). 
> > > 
> > > Any thoughts?
> > 
> > Look in your maillog?
> > 
> 
> Here's what I'm getting in my maillog:
> 
> Feb  2 13:30:46 www2 sendmail[6659]: i12IUku6006659: from=root, size=48,
> class=0, nrcpts=1, msgid=<200402021830 i12IUku6006659 www2 brueggers com>,
> relay=root localhost
> Feb  2 13:30:46 www2 sendmail[6659]: i12IUku6006659:
> to=ccampbell brueggers com, ctladdr=root (0/0), delay=00:00:00,
> xdelay=00:00:00, mailer=relay, pri=30043, relay=[127.0.0.1] [127.0.0.1],
> dsn=4.0.0, stat=Deferred: Connection refused by [127.0.0.1]
> 
> It seems like it's trying to send mail to itself?  It should be trying to
> send mail to the mail exchanger for brueggers.com which is
> mail.brueggers.com.
> 
> Why is it trying to send to 127.0.0.1?  
> 
> Christian
> 
> 
>