Bug 2356981

Summary:	Mutt will not send email using sendmail after update to Fedora 42 Beta
Product:	[Fedora] Fedora	Reporter:	W. Michael Petullo <mike>
Component:	mutt	Assignee:	Michal Hlavinka <mhlavink>
Status:	NEW ---	QA Contact:	Fedora Extras Quality Assurance <extras-qa>
Severity:	unspecified	Docs Contact:
Priority:	unspecified
Version:	42	CC:	adrian, athoscribeiro, fjanus, hhorak, juha.heljoranta, me, mhlavink, mmuzila, tomek
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Description W. Michael Petullo 2025-04-02 20:00:03 UTC

Description of problem:
Sending email using mutt started to fail after I upgraded a computer to Fedora 42 Beta.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
mutt-2.2.14-1.fc42.x86_64
postfix-3.9.1-4.fc42.x86_64

How reproducible:
Every time

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Create a mail in mutt.
2. Instruct mutt to send the mail, i.e., press 'y'.

Actual results:
Mutt prints "Error sending message, child exited 127 (Exec error.)."

Expected results:
Mutt should send the mail.

Additional info:
Running strings implies mutt expects sendmail at /usr/bin/sendmail:

$ strings /usr/bin/mutt | grep sendmail
/usr/bin/sendmail -oem -oi
sendmail_wait
/usr/bin/sendmail
[...]

However, after the update I found sendmail in /usr/sbin instead. I also noted the following during the update:

"/usr/sbin cannot be merged, /usr/sbin/arptables points to /etc/alternatives/arptables"

Indeed, running the following allowed mutt to again send mail:

$ sudo ln -s /usr/sbin/sendmail /usr/bin

I suspect this is related:

https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/f42-change-proposal-unify-usr-bin-and-usr-sbin-system-wide/99853

Comment 1 W. Michael Petullo 2025-04-14 13:42:20 UTC

A fresh install of mutt on Fedora 41 expects /usr/sbin/sendmail:

$ strings /usr/bin/mutt | grep sendmail
/usr/sbin/sendmail -oem -oi
sendmail_wait
/usr/sbin/sendmail
[...]

Comment 2 Tomasz Torcz 2025-04-14 14:04:06 UTC

https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/mutt/blob/rawhide/f/mutt.spec#_117

Comment 3 Adrian Reber 2025-04-21 16:12:26 UTC

Same happens to me with mutt-2.2.14-1.fc42.x86_64.

Changing /etc/Muttrc.local is my workaround:
 # Local configuration for Mutt.
+set sendmail="/usr/sbin/sendmail -oem -oi"

Comment 4 Michal Hlavinka 2025-05-20 15:25:20 UTC

Both /usr/bin and /usr/sbin on your system should be the same, you can verify with:

# ls -ld /usr/sbin
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 3 May 14 07:11 /usr/sbin -> bin

(note: beware no trailing '/' )

If everything is correct, it does not matter whether mutt points to /usr/bin/sendmail or /usr/sbin/sendmail

# /usr/sbin/sendmail -t </dev/null
sendmail: fatal: root(0): No recipient addresses found in message header

# /usr/bin/sendmail -t </dev/null
sendmail: fatal: root(0): No recipient addresses found in message header

so it seems like update of your system hit some issue. IIRC filesystem package should do the conversion of unifying bin and sbin directories, but some conflicting package that has files in both with same name can cause it to fail.

Comment 5 Juha Heljoranta 2025-05-24 19:07:24 UTC

My workaround was to add
set sendmail="/usr/sbin/sendmail -oem -oi"
in ~/.muttrc

For me /usr/sbin and /usr/bin are different (I've done several dnf system-upgrade since 2021):
# ls -ld /usr/sbin /usr/bin
dr-xr-xr-x. 1 root root 69504 May 24 20:17 /usr/bin
dr-xr-xr-x. 1 root root 14112 May 23 16:55 /usr/sbin

That said,
ls -la /usr/sbin/sendmail
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 21 May 23 16:55 /usr/sbin/sendmail -> /etc/alternatives/mta
# ls -la /usr/bin/sendmail
ls: cannot access '/usr/bin/sendmail': No such file or directory

And
# alternatives --display mta | grep sendmail
 link currently points to /usr/sbin/sendmail.postfix
/usr/sbin/sendmail.postfix - priority 60
 follower mta-sendmail: /usr/lib/sendmail.postfix
 follower mta-sendmailman: /usr/share/man/man1/sendmail.postfix.1.gz
Current `best' version is /usr/sbin/sendmail.postfix.

So I think we have a bug lurking in somehere but I think it is not mutt related.