F9: Outgoing mail using "mail" doesn't work

[Eric]

Good morning, James and Steve.

Thanks for your assistance.

I had previously verified that sendmail was running (said 
"/etc/init.d/sendmail status" and got back info that both sendmail 
and sm-client were running).  I had also checked /var/log/maillog and 
it claimed that the email had been "stat=Send (xxxxx Message accepted 
for delivery)".  However, the mail did not actually go out, and sat 
in /var/spool/mqueue waiting for whatever it is that mail in 
/var/spool/mqueue waits for.

The email was nothing but an empty test message ("mail 
spamsink at scoot.netis.com < /dev/null") sent to me at my regular email 
account, so it wasn't like I was being blocked by somebody at the 
other end.  Besides, other versions of Fedora (6 and 8) that I have 
running on other machines here all worked.

Then, I went and said "/etc/init.d/sendmail restart" and the test 
message went right out, cleared from /var/spool/mqueue, and appeared 
in my In box.  Just like it was supposed to.

I should note that I did this on two different F9 installations, one 
a VMware virtual machine and the other a "real" machine.  It behaved 
the same on both, and in each case, saying "/etc/init.d/sendmail 
restart" fixed it, for now at least.

Sendmail was evidently wedged in some way, so that it looked like it 
was running but wasn't really doing anything.  For now it appears to 
be working but now I get to try to figure out what it was that made 
it misbehave on two different machines.

As for MTAs, I hear you, James, about trying something besides 
sendmail, and I may do that at some point, but I really don't know 
much about MTAs or how to set them up so it's going to take some research.

Thanks again...