Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 77963
sendmail does not work
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:48:29 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i586; en-US; rv:1.0.1) Gecko/20020830 Description of problem: When I set pine to use sendmail my e-mail does not go out. I can later as root do 'sendmail -q' and it says no que but it then sends out all the stored up mail. Before I knew it was not working I had 52 messages qued up. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.write an e-mail and send it. 2.Notice the modem has sent out nothing. 3.As root type # sendmail -q Actual Results: When the sendmail -q is done all the e-mail is sent out Expected Results: It should have gone out right after sending the e-mail Additional info:
Can you please test the current sendmail rpms on http://people.redhat.com/laroche/ and check if they work ok? Also what warning/error messages are in /var/log/maillog prior to running "sendmail -q"? Thanks a lot, Florian La Roche
Created attachment 87104 [details] This shows what /var/log/maillog says and why
Hello, well I got the 2 rpm files from your web page and both work fine on my Red Hat 8 system. I left sendmail-8.12.6-4.i386.rpm installed but so far as I could tell both worked fine and the one shipped with Red Hat 8 does not. Might not be your area but "postfix" is a huge pain in the ass! It seems to interfer with sendmail and when I use postfix start ALL e-mail out stops! So will be careful to not use postfix and it sure needs fixing. I have 2 messages lost in the HUGE directory mess off /var/.
Ok, closing this bug if things work for you now. If you have reproducable problems with postfix, feel free to enter them into bugzilla, too. Thanks a lot, Florian La Roche
Sorry to say, I discovered the problem is not which rpm of sendmail is used, but rather what turned it "on". I brought up the computer and sent several e-mails and assummed they went out. But later in the day I checked and my mail had not gone out! I used mailp and saw there were 3 messages held up.I used sendmail -q and out they went. Then I turned senmail off. And then restarted it and it came up again and this time it's working properly again. So it's the manner that sendmail is started that effects it's performance. As root I used sendmail -bp to load it as a demon. In man sendmail it states that postfix is what starts sendmail now. That may be the problem.
It is now apparent that there is nothing wrong with Sendmail or Postfix. What is wrong is my inability to understand either system. This is compounded by the Red Hat manuals which are mutually counter-dict-ave. The Mail Transport Agent Switcher does not work as shown in the manual. When I use #/sbin/service postfix stop it fails. I'm convinced that some interaction between postfix and sendmail account for my problem. I have wasted 3 days of work trying to fix this problem and must now just quit.