mail only queued, not sent :-(

[Stefan Schulz]

Hello,

i have several HP-UX 10.20 Workstations and Servers here with sendmail 8.8.6 installed. I tried to set up sendmail so that scripts/programms can eMail me over the installed MS Exchange Server.

Therefor i modified the sendmail.cf entries

Dj
DS
DR

This configuration works fine on two Workstation i tested. Unfortunately the same configuration doesn't work on the server i tested. At least the files in /etc/mail are identical.

But in /var/adm/syslog/mail.log i get an entry which tells me as status for a email: stat=queued.

Everything else seems ok, but i never recieve a email from this system.

Where is the difference ? Which other configurations have an influence on sendmail. I know about /etc/resolv.con, /etc/hosts and /etc/mail/service.switch but they all seem to be ok.

Any ideas ?

[Brian M. Fisher · Accepted solution]

This sounds like a hostname resolution problem.
If the /etc/nsswicth.conf file

- contains a source reference to DNS in any order, then sendmail will do a DNS MX record lookup regardless of the presence of a source of files.

- does not contain /etc/resolv.conf,

1. The resolver assumes the name server is running locally.

2. Sendmail then sends a query for an MX record lookup to the local nameserver.

3. Since there is no response (because the nameserver is not running), then Sendmail will treat this query as a transient failure and subsequently queue for future delivery.

Also try:
sendmail -v -q

This will provide error output that can be easily interpreted by the user.

Brian
<*(((>< er

[CHRIS_ANORUO]

Brian is right in his contribution.
I had a similar problem, check your /etc/rc.log file for errors.
In my case /etc was writeable and not executable. It should have 555 ie..(dr-xr-xr-x) for the permission when you do an
ls -ld /etc

[Stefan Schulz]

Thanks for those replys. Brian pointed me towards the hostname resolution. After reconfiguring our local nameserv so that it was absolutely waterproof i found the problem in the /etc/nsswitch.conf.

Seems that there is a "slight" difference between continue and return ;-) Although it looked right, it wasn't.