Missing Mail

[Joe Redman]

I am running sendmail version 8.12.9 on a N4000 under HP-UX 11.0. We push a great deal of mail through this system. Sometimes mail will not get delivered to where it needs to go even though it shows up in the mail log as being queued. It just seems to disappear. This is a sporadic problem.

Any ideas???

Thanks,
Joe

[someone_4]

hi

did you run
mailq

this will show you everything that is in your queue and a reason why it was not delivered.

Richard

[Joe Redman]

Yes, mailq is also where I've seen that the messages are queued. They never show being sent or any other action taken against them. They just disappear from the queue.

[doug mielke]

We had this proble after our corp. mail server ( Exchange) was 'split'onto 2 servers to share the load.
We found all our mail, just being forwarded back and forth between the 2 exchange boxes. It only happened when crop. mail load, ( not just Unix mail) was high.

If Unix sent it out, it could be, literally, out of your hands.

[someone_4]

Hi Joe

what are the errors that you see in mailq ?


Richard

[Mark Greene_1]

Is this mail just internal to your network, just mail with external destinations, or both?

If external mail is involved in anyway, see if any filtering changes by your network people (including router changes) or by your ISP were recently made. Maybe send a test mail with domain masquarading enabled to see if that makes a difference.

Also, if you run this:

grep -i deferred /var/adm/syslog/mail.log

Do you get any output, and is there any apparent correlation between times or senders or destinations?

mark

[Wouter Jagers]

When an email doesn't arrive, the sender should get a message from some point along the way, stating the nature of the problem.

If this is not the case, there might indeed be issues with the sending or receiving server.

Are different destinations affected ? Or is it one and the same ? If I understand correctly, you can see the messages in the mailq and later they are gone, leaving no trace of errors anywhere. This makes me assume the mail has actually left towards the next gateway on its path.

Check your mail logs for these mails, too. They should be in /var/adm/syslog/ , files would be mail.log or syslog.log

First things to look for are whether or not the mail actually crosses the wire to the outside, and wrestle your way through all the postmaster and mailer-daemon mails looking for 'undeliverable' notices..

regards
Wouter

[Steven E. Protter]

You see entries in mailq because you have not properly configured your machine to get mail off the box.

Much as I hate sendmail 8.12 here is what you check...

One proviso: I don't have sendmail 8.12 working on any of my servers. HP officially doesn't support it and I think I know why. My instructions should work, but they might not.

Instructions:

How do you want mail to get off your box?

If you have a direct connection to the Internet or can resolve ouside hostnames and have port 25 open on your firewall for outbound mail, you can set up DNS.

1) edit /etc/nsswitch.conf and make sure on host resolution dns is first. If files is first, you can change it, but you'll break openspool if you still use it and might break older versions of omniback.

2) cat /etc/resolv.conf
Are these servers reachable? Ping them, make sure.

3) Do they resolve domains? Test it.
nslookup hpconsulting.com. If you don't get an answer dns isn't working right. You can also use dig hpux.com (the domain does not matter). dig only works if you have BIND 9.2.x or installed it.

After any configuration change here you'll need to restart the sendmail daemon

/sbin/init.d/sendmail stop
/sbin/init.d/sendmail start

Non-DNS solution.

DS directive

vi /etc/mail/sendmail.cf

Look at the DS directive.

DS
[IP_address_of_relay_server]

save the file

/sbin/init.d/sendmail stop
/sbin/init.d/sendmail start


If DNS is broken you can't use a hostname in here, you must use the IP address. Otherwise the hostname of the relay box is fine.

Funny thing about relay boxes, there is a lot that can go wrong there.

On the standard symmantec smtp relay box, you'll need to have mail relay explicitly authorized for each and every HP box you want to relay mail. For Exchange, same basic thing. In either circumstances, these boxes may reject your mail due to improper patches or other reasons. You'll have to look at logs on those servers if your mail is accepted.

How do you know if your mail is excepted? mailq is a start, but you can run a diagnostic to see.

sendmail -v -d8.99 -d38.99 someone@yourdomain.net

Type some silly text

.


You will see if the mail is accepted or rejected. Before you change something, based on your original post, I guarantee you the mail will be rejected. Thats why its in the mailq.

SEP