root can't send mail to cellphone.

[Steve Post]

If the box reboots or has some serious alarm, user root would be sending me an email, and paging me, and sending to my cell.

I get my mail, and the page. But the cell phone refuses to accept the email. I know this is the case through testing. I.E. I send as user billy, the cell works. I send as user root, the cell fails.

any ideas?

[Patrick Wallek]

Where does it fail? What error do you get? Does /var/adm/syslog/mail.log show anything?

[Steve Post]

/var/adm/syslog/mail.log shows it goes out fine.
I don't get an error. I don't the email either.
The lack of my cell phone ringing shows me the message did not arrive.

I log in as user billy. I send an email to my cell phone. The message arrives in less that 2 minutes.

I su to root for a sec and send a second email to my cell phone. I get nothing.

I send out 20 messages while in the system as root. I get none of them.
I send out 20 messages while in the system as billy, bobob, barney, steve...any valid user, I get all 20 messages.

I look in /var/adm/syslog/mail.log, it shows all 40 messages went out with no problems.

[Patrick Wallek · Accepted solution]

If the messages are leaving your HP-UX box, I would say your config is good there.

Sounds like you need to check with your cell phone provider. It may be that messages are getting dropped because they are coming from root. They may be seen as SPAM.

[Steve Post]

Yeah that's what I think too. I know it's going out of the box with no problem.

I do have one other idea. ALL outgoing mail goes to a windowsNT server that is completely out of my control. The mail.log shows it being accepted by the NT server. Perhaps the NT server lies. Perhaps it accepts the mail, but it really throws it away. I would find this hard to believe.

[Patrick Wallek]

That is possible. I have had to work with our e-mail admin in the past to allow certain ID's from certain machine to send e-mail.

I would definitely check with the NT admin and see what that log shows for your root e-mail messages.

[Steven E. Protter]

A common issue is the fully qualified domain name is not acceptable to the inbound mail server which services the cellphone.

Example, my servers at my old job.

root@moriah.juf.net

Great accept nobody registered moriah.juf.net so servers like aol, my own and others will not accept mail, even if its passed.

Another thing to check is some servers will not accept mail from ip addresses that do not include reverse lookup. I had to ask my ISP to set that up for me, its not automatic.

SEP
Israel

[generic_1]

Log in as root and send an email to your outlook if thats what you use.

echo "Test"| mailx -s "testing" you@yourworkemail.com

This will test to be sure its not cell provider thats not the issue.

You could try a internet email like yahoo next, if you wanted a intermediate test.

If those work your box is fine, unless your simlply not generating the email.
In that case I would check that you just did not typo your email in ITO or whatever your using to generate your errors.

[Steve Post]

Ok. I sent two messages to my internal pc mail account (it's behind the firewall).

One was sent when I was user root. One was sent when I was user billy. The from field on both messages was rpt@box. Both got to my pc.

I looked at the "options" tab to view the "internet headers" of the messages.
The message that fails to go out to the cell has "Received: (from "root@localhost")"

The message that works has "Received: (from "billy@localhost")".

In sendmail, I send everything to an NT mailserver. I let that box sort things out.

I used the "From:" option to send it from rpt@box. But that still showed root@localhost within the headers. I figure there is probably a simple fix from with sendmail.cf to tell it to use a fake name like "notroot@localhost." But I don't know where to dig in there.

[Steve Post]

I put in a new forum entry. I know the cell phone is not accepting anything email if "root@localhost" is anywhere in the mail header.
The new question is how to change root@localhost to something acceptable.