clarify email from unix account to corp account not working

[Hanry Zhou]

clarify users believe that they were missing emails from the server to their corporate email account within a certain of time window.
Other than that, they did not provide me any deail information.

But, I checked the system, and syslog.log, I don't see anything wrong now.

I feel, this is an application issues, and as system administrator, I don't know how app works. Or, they would have to tell me how this problem is related to any system issues...

Am I right? how should I response to the users request, and which part of system I can start to looking into?

Thanks,

[Keith Johnson]

I don't know the Clarify application, but assuming it uses Senmmail as the mail transfer agent, check the /var/adm/syslog/mail.log file for the time frame in question.

[Keith Johnson]

Senmmail should be Sendmail.

KJ

[Yang Qin_1]

If your Unix server configured properly, you should be able to find mail.log in /var/adm/syslog/. It log all emails sent out from the server. You can at least show your user that all emails were sent out or there is no any application sending emails in a specific time window.

Yang

[Hanry Zhou]

I have already checked that log file, and could not see anything wrong in the file, nor any messages with regards sending emails to the account that they are expecting, though I can find some messages about sending emails to other corporate accounts.

[Hanry Zhou]

The question is, I don't know how the application email system works. If emails sent out by the applications, will these kind of email activities be logged in the mail.log file?

[Ivan Krastev]

Hi Hanry,

If Clarify use own smtp engine for sending mail you should check in app logs (if you have any) . But if you see other mails from same program going to other users via system mail transport (in mail.log file) try to send mail from clarify to these users without mails to see results. I'm almost sure that this is problem like "i don't have mail - so your system dosn't work" :)

regards,
ivan

[Hanry Zhou]

Ivan,

2 questions for you:

1. what are differences between smtp method which is used by Clarify as you indicated and the system mail tranport which is logged in mail.log file?

2. I feel the same, "i don't have mail - so your system dosn't work". But, what would you say to users to response this assumption?

[Yang Qin_1]

Unix system use sendmail to send emails. The applications like: mail, mailx, elm ... they all use system mail tool so they all log the info into /var/adm/mail.log.

If users believe "i don't have mail - so your system dosn't work" then you just send emails from your Unix machine to their corporate mail accounts. If they can receive the mails sent from Unix machine they cannot say your system dosn't work.

Yang

[Keith Johnson]

Hanry,

If Clarify uses Sendmail as its mail transfer agent, you should see entries for each attempted delivery. If you are at an impasse, that is, you don't see a problem on the server side and the end-users are not receiving mail; perhaps speaking with the Clarify application administrator might help.

KJ

[Michael Gleibman]

Hello,

afaik, Clarify uses standard mail delivery mechanisms (mailx/sendmail) originating from Clarify DB server.
Therefore, you might need to check the /var/adm/syslog/mail.log as well as syslog.log for any mail-related issues. You also might want to check the MTA configuraion (/etc/mail/sendmail.cf and in case of sendmail).

Usually if a normal user is able to send an e-mail from Clarify server, so is the clarify application.

It might depend on the exact implementation though.

Michael