/var/mail/<user id >related mail box

[sarma]

I did not realize that I posted under linux. but most of the underlying processes must be similar.

[Steven E. Protter]

Well there, now the confusion is explained.

You posted to Linux Sysadmin.

bdf /var

As noted /var/adm is the HP-UX equivalent.

SEP

[sarma]

as the basics being equal, the situation I am in as follows :

the Oracle Apps uses the java mailer in conjunction with smtp
when the apps sends an outbound mail, it makes use of the smtp to send to a mailbox on the mailserver. The java threads using an IMAP processes them and sends those mails to respective end uesrs.

When we are sending these emails through the apps, they were getting nowhere eventhoug I can send the mail from cmd line on the box. When the sendmail was bounced magically, the Oracle Apps were sending the mails fine

I reviewd the mail.log under /var/adm, I noticed the messages like

Aug 24 10:53:05 orbitdev sendmail[22756]: KAA22756: ruleset=check_mail, arg1=, relay=applmgr@orbitdev.server.kn
x [10.1.15.7], reject=501 Sender domain must exist

Also, I saw after rebooting the box, it was looking for nis and we are not using nis.

Now the questions are :
1. if we are not using nis, how do we debug situation that we gotten in ? Is there a way to track these issues ?

2. Why does the "Sender domain must exist" gone after the senmail was bounced ? Is there a correlation there ?
thanks

[Ivan Ferreira]

See:

http://www.sendmail.org/~ca/email/chk-89f.html

Section:

Check Sender Information

[sarma]

Thanks for that doc, I am looking at that. Meanwhile, when I looked at the mail.log, I noticed the following error :

NIS map mail.aliases specified, but NIS not running

This I suspect is causing email outages when we reboot the server ? HOw do we get arond it ?

[Fred Martin_1]

We had a similar thing happen. Some users were popping in for mail and getting errors since they had not received their first email yet, and I think Pine gives a similar error.

I use task customization in SAM, and run a script every time a user is created. I did this for other reasons (putting certain files in the user's home directory, etc) but it also pre-creates the mailbox for the user:

# set up an empty mail inbox
touch /var/mail/$2
chown $2:mail /var/mail/$2
chmod 660 /var/mail/$2

SAM provides the user name as $2, so this was a nice way to pre-create an empty mail file with the correct permissions, just as the user is created.