mailx not sending to a pager

[John Goetz]

Trying to send the following:

echo "test"|mailx -s "test" "phone number@page.nextel.com"

Never get paged.

[Mark Greene_1]

Have you setup sendmail or something similar to act as the MTA to the Internet (presumably via your ISP)?

mark

[Patrick Wallek · Accepted solution]

Verify that the mail is actually going out of your server. You must have sendmail configured appropriately.

Check /var/adm/syslog/mail.log for any errors.

[Jeff_Traigle]

If you try sending to an email address, does the message arrive there? Have you tried sending a page from some other system (maybe Yahoo! or something) and received that page on your phone? Is the mail staying in /var/spool/mqueue?

Based on the info you've given it could be most any reason. There's lots you haven't said about your troubleshooting so far.

[RAC_1]

Does it go out of the hp-ux box??
--> Check mailq, /var/adm/syslog/mail.log

Does it get blocked at smart relay-if you use one??
--> Check the logs on smart relay.
telnet to port 25, Once connecetd,
expn "email_Address

Can you expand the mail alias??
--> /usr/sbin/expand_alias "email_Address"

Anil

[John Goetz]

I checked /var/adm/syslog/mail.log and the mail does leave the HP server ok. Mailx on this servers does work since I can send to my email account ok. It has something do to with going outside of the companies internet. Just not sure how to fix it.

[A. Clay Stephenson]

The other guys have pretty much answered your mailx problem; now I think I'll rain on your parade in a whole new way. What makes you think you are going to get a page when the network is down? Text messages are great and should be the first line of defense but you also need to think deeper. As a fallback, you should have a modem on your box (at least your monitoring server) that can also simply dial your pager ans send numeric codes. The pager thinks it's getting a callback number but you know that any number that starts with a '9' is really bad, an '8' is a little less bad and so on.

[RAC_1]

Does your pager service provider allows it??

Anil

[Prashant Zanwar_4]

Check if the relay server is there in your sendmail config:

grep -i ^DS /etc/mail/sendmail.cf

this should have a valid sendmail server.
You may try restarting sedmail once.
Thanks
Prashant

[Jeff_Traigle]

Ok. Now we're getting somewhere. Since it's just external email delivery that isn't working and it's just disappearing into a black hole (assuming so since you didn't mention any bounced messages), I would guess your corporate mail servers (Exchange perhaps?) do not allow unauthenticated email to be delievered outside the company's network. This was a security measure implemented at one of my previous employers. They used Exchange. If you weren't logged in via Outlook, you could not send email outside the company (couldn't even use rules to automatically forward messages from an authenticated account... forwarding had to be done manually).

[Jeff_Traigle]

A. Clay makes a good point amount using email as a system monitoring method... but, in defense of the practice of emailing to a pager, there are cases when it's useful. In the past, I've utilized it to send a notice that a daily process completed on a server. If I didn't get the page at the expected time, I knew I better start investigating. There was another network montoring system in place with a modem attached to send pages for those types of outages, but that didn't really provide the process completion notification I wanted. It all depends on the goal of the task at hand.

[Bill Hassell]

Most likely, your pager company discards all email from sources that do not have an Internet DNS entry. This is a fairly common way to prevent spam on your pager. Test this by sending an email from your email account--if it works OK, you have can arrange to have your computer's name added to your ISP's nameserver. Some pager companies (Verizon) will send your pager an empty email message to at least let you know something was received but no text from the message. I got around this problem by forwarding the message to another box which is known to the Internet and it forwards the message on to the pager company.

[Mark Greene_1]

"Mailx on this servers does work since I can send to my email account ok. It has something do to with going outside of the companies internet. "

Two things: make sure that the mail server that the HP system is sending the non-system mail to (mail no for login IDs on the HP box) knows about your ISPs DNS servers. If the DNS that your mail system is using doesn't have your ISPs DNS boxes in its forwarders list, mail isn't going to go anywhere.

Second, edit the sendmail.cf file and in the DM entry put your domain name. The will remove the host name from the "from" info in the mail and eliminate any issues with your ISP's DNS not having your system listed.

mark