Timothy Murphy schrieb:

Larry Brower wrote:

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I see that mail sent from a remote computer never leaves the computer, the last entry in /var/log/maillog being "Queued mail for delivery".

The message was accepted. You failed to supply sufficient information to troubleshoot further.

Thanks for your response. I think I have solved the problem. The trouble was that I put my home address in the From line, and the ISP in Italy rejected the mail on that account.

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2. Where incidentally is the mail queued for delivery?

I don't see it in /var/cache/ .

Have you looked in /var/spool ?

I did actually look there, but /var/spool/mail/tim and /var/spool/mqueue/ were empty.

Hi Timothy,

taking the information from your other posting of this thread you were using the sendmail binary to send the message. This leads to using the submission mechanism (that's ok and standard).

The MSP accepted your message - thus the "queued mail for delivery" log note - and tried to send it out using the MTA daemon part of your sendmail installation.

Until this is successful the message is kept queued in /var/spool/clientmqueue, to be queried by

mailq -Ac

While running just "mailq" the MTA queue (/var/spool/mqueue) is checked for messages and the reason why a delivery is postponed is shown as well.

If you have messages queued and want to see some more output from the delivery process you can run

- for the MSA processing: sendmail -Ac -q -v

- for the MTA processing: sendmail -q -v

The information is printed on stdout.

Btw. /var/spool/mail/tim is the mailbox (inbound) spool of user tim. Messages in there will not be processed by sendmail any longer as they are delivered.

Best regards

Alexander

Thanks very much for your useful posting. The mail is arriving now without delay, so the problem must just have been that my remote ISP did not like me giving a local address.

Check the full headers of the email you eventually got - you said you had some "spoofing" going on, essentially. Your ISP may have held up the email due to SPF issues or similar. RFC issues.

Alan McKay wrote:

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220 FBCMCL01B06.fbc.local Microsoft ESMTP MAIL Service, Version: 6.0.3790.3959 ready at Sun, 22 Nov 2009 01:02:20 +0100

I'm confused. This seems to be running MS mail server - what does that have to do with Centos?

That is the response from my ISP's mail-server.

You've got 2 boxes? 1 is a MS mail server and the other is Centos?

I only have 1 box in this context, which is running Centos-5.4 .

Thanks for your reply. Actually, the mail was sent after a couple of hours.

I think the reason for the delay was that I gave my home email address in the From line. Now I've changed it (as below) the mail is sent at once.

Is sendmail running on Centos?

Yes

Are you sure it is running?

Yes

Is this the system from which you attempted to send mail?

Yes

How did you attempt to send it?

I sent it with a tiny python program (below)

Did you check the "mailq" command on that system?

No. But I checked that the files in /var/spool/* were all empty.

Does that system have a public IP?

No, the IP address changes quite often.

Or is it behind a firewall?

No

---------------------------------------------- [tim@althea ~]$ cat ip.py SENDMAIL = "/usr/sbin/sendmail" import os import socket import urllib2 import sys import time tt = time.ctime() ipaddr = "192.168.5.22" p = os.popen("%s -t -fgayleard@alice.it" % SENDMAIL, "w") p.write("To: gayleard@eircom.net\r\n") p.write("From: Timothy Murphy gayleard@alice.it\r\n") p.write("Subject: Anghiari IP address\r\n") p.write("\r\n") p.write(ipaddr + "\r\n") p.close() sys.exit() ----------------------------------------------