mailx not working

[GREGORY JONES_3]

messages just queue up, not sent.

top
Load averages: 54.95, 45.52, 43.57
269 processes: 173 sleeping, 82 running, 14 zombies
Cpu states:
LOAD USER NICE SYS IDLE BLOCK SWAIT INTR SSYS
54.95 20.6% 16.4% 24.8% 38.3% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0%

Memory: 120584K (87616K) real, 705076K (127444K) virtual, 1094172K free Page# 1/17

don't see any processes taking too much cpu
pls advise??

[Muthukumar_5]

check this:

mailq

what you are getting? Any error messages in mail log.

--
Muthu

[Bejoy C Alias]

Ur load average is too high. sendmail by default will not send mails ( will only queue ) if ur load average is 8 or more . also sendmail will reject mails if the load average is above 12 ( default ). u can change these two parameters in ur sendmail.cf file if the server does not have any performance issues. otherwise find out who is eating up ur load.

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom Gregory,

mailx uses sendmail as its MTA, for diagnostic purposes, lets send a test email.

sendmail -v -d8.99 -d38.99
type some text
.

This will provide a verbose output.

Possible problems:

sendmail.cf has a DS directive set and the server its trying to relay to will not accept the mail.

/etc/nsswitch.conf has a host name resolution scheme that doesn't work with this system.

Name resolotuion does not work, so sendmail can't send the mail. /etc/resolv.conf

The entries in resolv.conf must respond to network requests.

nslookup yahoo.com

If you get no answer, its a name resolution problem. If you get an answer, see the mail.log file as noted above and see what the error is.

Likely the cause of the problem is related to something I've noted above.

SEP