How to get mail to local destinations delivered?

[Chris G]

On Tue, Nov 13, 2007 at 03:13:13AM +1030, Tim wrote:
> On Mon, 2007-11-12 at 13:51 +0000, Chris G wrote:
> > The whole problem is that mail to 'root' or 'chris' or whoever on the
> > local system fails to get delivered.
> 
> Just to be clear that it's failing delivery, and not a problem in
> reading:  You've looked into the /var/mail/root and /var/mail/chris
> files to see nothing being added?  (Use a text reader, like "less".)
> 
> Check /var isn't too full?  Show us the permissions and ownership of the
> directory and files, include the SELinux contexts.
> 
> e.g. The outputs from:
> 
> df -h /var/mail
> ls -ld /var/mail
> ls -ldZ /var/mail
> ls -l /var/mail
> ls -lZ /var/mail
> 
Look at my earlier postings with contents of maillog, you can see
sendmail accepting the E-Mail and then trying to send it to the
outside world, which fails.  Since this machine doesn't accept
incoming SMTP connections once the mail has been sent out it can never
get back in.

The issue is that I can't persuade sendmail to deliver mail locally
direct to user's mail spool.

There's masses of disk space available anyway:-

    /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00
                          287G  157G  116G  58% /


and ls -lL /var/mail
total 144
-rw-rw---- 1 apache    mail     0 2007-09-24 15:14 apache
-rw-rw---- 1 avahi     mail     0 2007-09-24 15:16 avahi
-rw-rw---- 1 ben       mail     0 2007-09-24 16:53 ben
-rw-rw---- 1 chris     mail 23669 2007-11-12 10:12 chris
-rw-rw---- 1 dbus      mail     0 2007-09-24 15:16 dbus
-rw-rw---- 1 distcache mail     0 2007-09-24 15:14 distcache
-rw-rw---- 1       500 mail     0 2007-09-24 15:53 fedora
-rw-rw---- 1 gdm       mail     0 2007-09-24 15:21 gdm
-rw-rw---- 1 haldaemon mail     0 2007-09-24 15:17 haldaemon
-rw-rw---- 1 hsqldb    mail     0 2007-09-24 15:17 hsqldb
-rw-rw---- 1 isbd      mail     0 2007-09-24 16:53 isbd
-rw-rw---- 1 mailnull  mail     0 2007-09-24 15:14 mailnull
-rw-rw---- 1 maxine    mail     0 2007-09-24 16:53 maxine
-rw-rw---- 1 mysql     mail     0 2007-10-01 22:19 mysql
-rw-rw---- 1 nfsnobody mail     0 2007-09-24 15:17 nfsnobody
-rw-rw---- 1 nscd      mail     0 2007-09-24 15:14 nscd
-rw-rw---- 1 ntp       mail     0 2007-09-24 15:14 ntp
-rw------- 1 root      root     0 2007-11-10 05:33 root
-rw-rw---- 1 rpc       mail     0 2007-09-24 15:14 rpc
-rw-rw---- 1 rpcuser   mail     0 2007-09-24 15:17 rpcuser
-rw-rw---- 1 rpm       mail     0 2007-09-24 15:13 rpm
-rw-rw---- 1 smmsp     mail     0 2007-09-24 15:14 smmsp
-rw-rw---- 1 squid     mail     0 2007-09-24 15:15 squid
-rw-rw---- 1 sshd      mail     0 2007-09-24 15:17 sshd
-rw-rw---- 1 tcpdump   mail     0 2007-09-24 15:15 tcpdump
-rw-rw---- 1 torrent   mail     0 2007-09-24 15:17 torrent
-rw-rw---- 1 vcsa      mail     0 2007-09-24 15:14 vcsa
-rw-rw---- 1 webalizer mail     0 2007-09-24 15:15 webalizer
-rw-rw---- 1 xfs       mail     0 2007-09-24 15:19 xfs
-rw-rw---- 1 zelma     mail     0 2007-09-24 16:53 zelma


Note that the mail that's there for chris is mail I have put there
using my MUA, it's not been put there by sendmail.

-- 
Chris Green