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coding_hero
Asked: 2012-01-10 14:38:05 +0800 CST

Sendmail is not sending

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I have a sendmail server on a Solaris 10 server that's stopped working. I can't seem to find anything about failed messages in /var/adm/sendmail. Here's what I'm seeing when I try to debug:

[(root)/var/adm]$ sendmail -v [email protected] < testmessage 
[email protected]... queued
[(root)/var/adm]$ /usr/ucb/mail -v [email protected]
Subject: Test message
Here is a test message
.
EOT
[(root)/var/adm]$ [email protected]... queued
[(root)/var/adm]$ mailq
/var/spool/mqueue is empty
    Total requests: 0

So, it doesn't look like it's doing anything. Sometimes when I try the debug, I get a '127.0.0.1 Connection Refused' back, but it doesn't do it constantly. Note: I've substituted my personal gmail address with '[email protected]' above. There's no procmail or anything set up for this address, and I am continually checking the Spam folder.

Any other things I can try to figure out why this isn't working?

Edit: Output of mailq -C includes lines and lines of this:

q0AFMJwG026997X    1629 Tue Jan 10 10:22 MAILER-DAEMON
             (Deferred: Connection refused by [127.0.0.1])

Could have sworn I tried this yesterday, but neither telnetting to localhost 25 from the machine nor telnetting to the machine from my desktop works:

[(root)/]$ telnet 127.0.0.1 25
Trying 127.0.0.1...
telnet: Unable to connect to remote host: Connection refused
[(root)/]$

and

[~]$ telnet 192.168.129.50 25
Trying 192.168.129.50...
telnet: connect to address 192.168.129.50: Connection refused
telnet: Unable to connect to remote host

Sendmail is running:

[(root)/]$ ps -ef |grep sendmail
smmsp 18616     1   0 16:22:18 ?           0:00 /usr/lib/sendmail -Ac -q15m
root 18614     1   0 16:22:18 ?           0:03 /usr/lib/sendmail -bd -q15m

But I don't see it listening on port 25 with 'netstat -an'.

EDIT: Thank you all for sticking around and helping. I have sendmail listening now on port 25 (it was refusing due to the high load average and the 'QueueLA' and 'RefuseLA' values). I can telnet to port 25 now and send email using SMTP commands. But, any mail I try to send with sendmail or /usr/ucb/mail still gets queued and disappears. What else do I need to check?

EDIT: I'm going to go ahead and close this, because I've moved on to a new set of problems now. The QueueLA and RefuseLA settings helped sendmail get up and running on port 25, but now I'm having a queueing issue. I've opened a new question here.

solaris unix smtp sendmail

4 Answers

  1. So sendmail was really fast between sending the mail and issuing mailq, right? You executed commands prove nothing and deny nothing. The only thing that would work as evidence is the logfile, a tcpdump of the network traffic or something similar that shows the sending process.

    On the other hand "stopped working" means it worked before. So what changed between then and now?

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  2. Best Answer

    QueueLA and RefuseLA values were too low. Raising those brought sendmail back up on port 25, but I'm having a different problem now. Here's a question over the next problem I'm having.

    • 0

  3. Another tip is to see if the sendmail services are enabled, although the two sendmail processes already are running:

    % svcs -a | grep sendmail
online         20:47:39 svc:/network/smtp:sendmail
online         20:47:59 svc:/network/sendmail-client:default

    If they NOT "online" try:

    % svcadm enable smtp:sendmail
% svcadm  enable sendmail-client:default

    Now you should be able to do:

    % telnet localhost 25
QUIT
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  4. Without any logs or other evidence....I'd say that your sendmail process is not working or not enabled for execution due to solaris 10 configuration.

    You could see if there is a process is running using something like ps -aef and looking for the sendmail processes.

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