no mail from / for root

[Steve Phillips]

j_70 at comcast.net wrote:
> # Person who should get root's mail
> #root:          marc
> 
> I imagine that last entry is the source of my problem? There is no user 'marc'. Also, what about non-root users they are not getting mail either. Thanks for your help with this.

Bit of a tail chasing exercise actually, there is nothing in 
/etc/aliases (or /etc/mail/aliases) that would cause mail not to be 
delivered to "root" or whatever its aliased to in the manner that you 
describe under a default installation.

A default installation will have "root" set to the local mailbox "root" 
in /var/spool/mail/root - the above entry is an example (commented out) 
of how you may redirect roots mailbox if you so with, you would need to 
actively change it however and then rerun newaliases (or restart 
sendmail) before it takes affect.

You should probably look into the mail logs and see if there are any 
delivery errors, also examine the mailq (type 'mailq') and see if there 
is anything there, the logs /var/log/messages and /var/log/maillog (or 
something similar) should give hints as to what is going wrong.

You mentioned a while back that you had disabled sendmail ? sendmail by 
default will bind to localhost only (again, unless you actively change 
it from the default) and the mail submission agent will try to deliver 
mail there via SMTP - if you have disabled sendmail then the submission 
agent will not be able to connect locally to port 25 to deliver the mail 
and it will end up in the submission queue (i forget exactly where this 
is, somewhere under /var/spool most likely)

Binding to localhost is a security precaution which prevents others 
outside the machine from connecting and sending mail via you if you mis 
configure something (exceptionally common with sendmail).

Either way, check your logs for errors - you will probably find the 
problem there, look for messages like "deferred" or similar.

-- 
Steve.