sendmail dead.letter reprocess

[Fred Ruffet]

Hi all,

I have a sendmail process that has been unconfigured for a while. /var/tmp/dead.letter has grown and contains many mails. Some of the mails inside are important to me, and I'd like to reprocess this in sendmail for it to send them. Is this possible ? and How ?

Any help appreciated,

Fred

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

Seems possible.

Don't know which link has the magic bullet.

http://www.ussg.iu.edu/usail/mail/debugging/

You might try something simple like using cat to append the file to your /var/spool/mail/username file

SEP

[Fred Ruffet]

Shalom Peter,

I've been away for a while and it's nice to see you're always here :)

In fact, yes, I think than adding it to my own mailbox would give me access to the mails. But I'd like get them delivered to their true recipients, which are not local users.

Mails have been generated by programs and sent to local sendmail. This local sendmail is supposed to send them to smtp relay, but this last one was refusing relaying. So mails have gone to dead.letter. I've solved my relaying problem. But I'd like to resent those mails.

I'm actually trying to understand /var/spool/mqueue directory usage, in order to put mails directly in it. But for the moment it doesn't work.

No need to say that some mails are old, and original programs are not able to write the same mails again.

Thanks,

Fred

[TTr]

The format of the dead.letter file is a mailbox format. That is the messages in this file are in the "received" state just as any message in the /var/mail/. You can not process this file with sendmail, you cab only process it with a mail reader such as mailx, elm, pine. You have the right idea using /var/spool/mqueue but you will have to do a lot of scripting footwork to break up each mail message from the dead.letter file and create a header file and a message file so that sendmail can process them. Or extract the "to" address and the body of the message and use mailx to resend them.

[Fred Ruffet]

Yes, that's what I'm working on. Perl is my friend :)

I'll probably go with mailx, cause I can't manage to put directly a file in /var/spool/mqueue.

[Dennis Handly]

>I'll probably go with mailx,

I use mailx. But if you need anything complex, you can use use thunderbird/mozilla/netscape manually to sort and forward mass quantities of mail to the proper user.

Just create an empty folder and use mailx's save command to save it in that folder.

[Fred Ruffet]

I said mailx cause I can script it and there is a huge amount of mails :)

Thanks everybody for your help.