Re: [cobalt-users] email

[denial <lists@xxxxxxxxxx>]

At 09:37 23/08/2003 -0400, you wrote:
> How Can I fully check my email server. We are receiving no emails. All is
> quiet. If we send and receive, the qpopper and sendmail seems to be working
> correctly. But, man, has it been too quiet.

At a guess I would say that you have installed MailScanner with the RBL 
features enabled or you have configured sendmail using m4 to use RBL. I had 
the same problem on Friday where I could see sendmail was (apparently) 
running but I wasn't receiving any mails, which was unusual due to the 
number active mailing lists I am subscribed to. Tracked the problem down to 
Osirusoft being shutdown.


http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/08/27/0214238&mode=thread&tid=111&tid=126

Otherwise it could be that it's just a quiet time for your email?

I'm also wondering how you will receive this reply if sendmail isn't 
working....but.....here's how I would troubleshoot....

Login to the server and "su -" to root.

tail -f /var/log/maillog

Then try sending yourself a mail from somewhere (it's always useful having 
a Hotmail account etc) and see what appears in the maillog. You should get 
an entry along the lines of below but from one of the Hotmail mail servers.

Aug 28 09:41:59 mailhost sendmail[26436]: h7S8fxW26436: 
from=<user@xxxxxxxxxx>, size
=43651, class=0, nrcpts=1, 
msgid=<89A75D465F880D49B07430278D92AD013FD818@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
com>, proto=ESMTP, daemon=MTA, relay=mail.mpasset.com [65.206.24.132]

If nothing appears in the maillog then try a connection onto port 25 of the 
server and issue the "ehlo" command. When I do this I get this response:

bash-2.03$ telnet www.houghton.org.uk 25
Trying 213.253.163.196...
Connected to www.houghton.org.uk.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 mailhost.crossharbour.co.uk ESMTP Sendmail 8.10.2/8.10.2; Thu, 28 Aug 
2003 09:33:13 +0100
ehlo
501 5.0.0 ehlo requires domain address

This shows that the ehlo command is being recognised and at least gets a 
response. When I had a problem nothing came back from"ehlo".

So you can try and use the "strace" command to find out what is happening. 
Track down the process ID for sendmail:

[root /root]# ps aux | grep -i sendmail
root     27251  0.5  0.2  2512 1228 ?        S    09:54   0:00 sendmail: 
accepti
root     27253  0.5  0.2  2728 1484 ?        S    09:54   0:00 sendmail: 
q1/h7S7

[root /root]# strace -ff -p 27251
select(5, [4], NULL, NULL, {48, 970000}

Then try a connection onto port 25 and see what happens.... Just be 
prepared for a lot of output to then go through. Again when I had a problem 
I scanned through the output to find that the server could not contact 
Osirusoft so editied /etc/mail/sendmail.cf to comment off the Osirusoft 
section then restarted sendmail until I could use m4 to clean it up.

        Dan