mail command

[Chris Hewitt]

On Mon, 2005-05-02 at 22:43, wang wrote:
> Thank you Chris,
> 
> > If is used to work, then something has changed to make it not work. So
> > the question is what have you changed since it did work?
> 
> I don't think I changed something. It jsut suddenly stopped working.

Something has changed. Things don't just stop. It may not be you that
made a change. What changed between when it used to work and when you
first noticed it did not? Upgrade, firewall, configure something etc.

> > Does it send mail locally, e.g.:
> > mail root at localhost -s test
> > text here
> > .

Did you try this test, to send mail locally? It will help to pin down
whether the problem is on your computer or with sending to your mail
server (which I assume is a different computer).

> when I only type the mail command with out any option,
> It says,
> 
> No mail for root

The mail program will also read mail. Typing it without parameters is to
read mail. This message just tells you that root does  not have any
mail. That is unusual, do you redirect roots mail to another user?
> 
> > Assuming sendmail is your MTA, is it running? At the prompt
> > ([chris at amdk63 chris]$ is my prompt), if you  do:
> > [chris at amdk63 chris]$ ps ax|grep sendmail
> >  3056 ?        S      0:00 /usr/sbin/sendmail -bd -q1h
> >  2200 pts/0    S      0:00 grep sendmail
> > [chris at amdk63 chris]$
> 
> when I try the same command, the system answer is,
> 
> smmsp      764  0.0  0.0  3404 1420 ?        S    Apr22   0:00 [sendmail]
> root     21056  0.0  0.0  4572  660 pts/1    S    14:15   0:00 grep sendmail

I'm not sure about the sendmail in brackets, anyone?

After trying to send mail locally, is the mail received by the user?
What is in the log file (for sendmail typically /var/log/maillog)?

Regards

Chris