mailx - sendmail differences

[Dan Copeland]

Hi guys,

This is not an HPUX question. One of our customers needed some help with mailing in general. He is running Data General UNIX. when he is trying to send mails through mail and sendmail commands to our company address it just hangs and it is not working. When he sends emails using mailx it works fine. When he sends emails to say yahoo address all mail commands works fine. Does Anybody know what are the major differences between mailx and mail or sendmail? What could be wrong?

Thanks in Advance

[Simon Hargrave]

Do you mean the mail command itself locks up, or the message sits in the out queue? What's in the mail log? What command lines are used? (for example could it be "hanging" waiting for user input?)

[Dan Copeland]

Here is the email details from the customer

$ mail xxx@yahoo.com
This is a test. (after entering "This is a test." I press Ctrl D and shell prompt immedately returns.)
$

$ mail xxx.yyy@alcoa.com
This is a test. (after entering "This is a test." I press Ctrl D and shell prompt does not appear for several minutes.)

[Deoncia Grayson_1]

After trying to send a mail to the company's address, look in your /var/adm/syslog/mail.log and tell us what message does it generate...

[Steven E. Protter]

in the end mailx uses sendmail to queue its mail for outbound delivery.

the difference is mailx has a somewhat easier to use command line interface.

Sounds like a DG Unix command line issue. sendmail isn't really designed for command line use (my opinion), but it can be done.

SEP

[Cem Tugrul]

i am agree with Steven...

[Bejoy C Alias]

Try this..and check any errors are coming..
sendmail -v -d0.1 xxx.yyy@alcos.com
This will show u the actual communication taking place between ur machine and the mail server of alcos.com if ur server is able to resolve the domain and connect to the mail server of alcos.com .

[Gopi Sekar]

may be something related to network and name resolution process.

when sendmail is invoked directly it tries to validate destination hostname. depending on nameserver availability and network issues, sendmail might take sometime to complete the testing and return back to user which he might think as hang.

check network settings and sendmail configuration settings related to network.

Regards,
Gopi