topic Re: Problem with user mail delivery in Operating System - Linux

Problem with user mail delivery

Dave Filchak — Fri, 14 Nov 2003 18:46:10 GMT

Hello all,

I have been struggling to find an answer to this problem for about 48 hours now .. during which time my users have not been able to receive email. We are using RH 7.3, sendmail 8.12.9 and Qpopper 4.05 standalone. Initially we thought that it was a DNS problem and to be sure, I do believe there were a few issues with that as well but I now believe that it is an issue with the MTA which is procmail. That or Sendmail or both. However, I can telnet in to the mail server and send mail and the DNS resolution seems to be working fine. If I use pine to go into my mailbox, the mail that I have either received or sent myself is there but when I use Qpopper to get my mail, it says I have no mail. Some clients were having issues with their mail bouncing back to them which would indicate a DNS problem but I believe that this was happening while I was fixing some of the aforementioned DNS issues.

The domain is zuka.net so if anyone has any knowledge in this area, I would appreciate greatly your input.

Regards,

Dave

Re: Problem with user mail delivery

Ragu_1 — Fri, 14 Nov 2003 22:12:04 GMT

Your mail is going to your Inbox. But Qpopper serves mail from /var/spool/mail/user to a pop3 user. Sendmail is pushing mail from /var/log/spool/user to procmail, it pushes it to your Inbox in your home dir. Your best bet is to comment the piping line in your sendmail config, which hands out mail to procmail. This way it will remain in the mail spool itself, so that a POP3 user can fetch his mail thru Qpopper.My 2 paise......

Re: Problem with user mail delivery

Jerome Henry — Sat, 15 Nov 2003 09:28:29 GMT

Problem seems to come rather from Qpopper. Which authentication method do you use ?

If your message is in /var/spool/mail/username, and you can't get it, then look at your Qpopper configuration, to check which directory it checks in.

I think it's the key, if your messages reach the right dir, then Procmail has nothing to do with it. Otherwise, let's blame it while looking at your conf file and log messages...

J

Re: Problem with user mail delivery

Dave Filchak — Sat, 15 Nov 2003 10:43:46 GMT

Bingo ... you hit the nail on the head. I am not sure how this happened but in /var, there is a symbolic link from mail to spool/mail. Somehow, and we are still trying to figure this out, the link changed to spool/popper. In the popper directory, there was indeed mailboxes but not for all users and there was no mail in them. Once I remade the proper link, everything started to flow again. Not... how to find out how this link was changed.

Anyway, thanks for your replys.

Dave

Re: Problem with user mail delivery

Jerome Henry — Sun, 16 Nov 2003 03:02:47 GMT

Sherlock Holmes would suspect a recent re-install of one part of the whole... as Qpopper update or sth...

Glad it works anyway :]]

J