sendmail + mutt (debian) setup question

Teodor Iliescu tiliescu-ZdyLq7YhDA8hunQcOVOuvCwD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org
Wed Nov 19 00:56:08 UTC 2003


On Tue, 18 Nov 2003, Max Blanco wrote:

> 
> Hi All,
> 
> I have a debian woody ppc system.  I intend this to be an offline 
> computer, so nothing fancy.  I would like to mail to other users on the 
> same machine.

Check if sendmail is listening on 127.0.0.1 (since you need local delivery 
only):

Try a simple:

	telnet localhost 25

If sendmail is indeed listening, you should get:

Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to localhost.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 localhost.localdomain ESMTP Sendmail 8.12.8/8.12.8; Tue, 18 Nov 2003 19:32:22 -0500
 
Otherwise, if the service has not been started, you should get:

telnet: connect to address 127.0.0.1: Connection refused

> I have mutt and sendmail installed, but so far, I can't send or receive 
> mail.  It jst goes into nullspace somewhere.  I'm mystified.

It does go somewhere. Check the following:

a) /var/log/maillog
This is the place where you will get information on delivery, queuing and 
so forth. Do a 'tail -20 /var/log/maillog'

b) /var/spool/mqueue
This is where your queued mail should be.

If you created aliases, check who it is going to under /etc/aliases.
If you changed the aliases file, you need to run newaliases.

> Any ideas?  I'm not particularly tied to either mutt or sendmail, so if 
> some other combination can do the job with no hassle, I'll try it.
> 

Try running pine if it is available on your system.
See if you get any new mail, or simply mail.

It could also be a misconfiguration of DNS, although you didn't give
enough information. For example if you are sending your e-mail to
root-uYAvd8PJE+hBDgjK7y7TUQ at public.gmane.org, where the FQDN of your box is foohost.com, it could be
that you have no such entry in /etc/hosts, nor bind is running. Sendmail 
would give up, since it would not be able to resolve your host name of 
foohost.com.

I had a similar problem in a lab, where I had sendmail listening on
172.16.1.2 (outside interface), but not on localhost (127.0.0.1). I was
obviously not able relay e-mails to outside (172.16.1.x), since when a MUA
(mail user agent - such as pine/mutt) tried to send an e-mail it needed to
connect to my local MTA (mail transfer agent such as sendmail/postfix)  
listening on 127.0.0.1, it failed.

Post any more results you get to the list, and I am sure we can help you 
out. :)

-- 
Teodor I.
http://penguincomputing.iwarp.com
GPG key fingerprint : 9AC8 A05C 78AD AD73 91DB  CBE4 B644 F402 FBFD 5927

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