Hi,

I'm running sendmail 8.14 on CentOS. Things work most of time. However, recently I started to get some complaint about not receiving some emails.

For example, I can find the following in the /var/log/maillog (I've removed actual school name but I verified that all hostname is resolvable by DNS)

Feb 15 16:06:23 server sendmail[26672]: v1FL6NRi026672: from=<xyz@eservices.school.edu>, size=36199, class=0, nrcpts=1, msgid=<8e97619b-27c7-79c2-c40d-51c69b88c9e5@eservices.school.edu>, bodytype=8BITMIME, proto=ESMTP, daemon=MTA, relay=school2.edu [128....]
Feb 15 16:06:24 xtl sendmail[26673]: v1FL6NRi026672: to=\\abc, delay=00:00:01, xdelay=00:00:00, mailer=local, pri=96426, dsn=2.0.0, stat=Sent

However, abc can't find email from xyz in the inbox or spam folder around that time.

What does the above log mean? Does it mean the message is actually received, accepted and delivered to the inbox? If so, what could happen to the message?

Thanks

is unclear?

So it's accepted into inbox, right?

It looks like it is delivered to the inbox, but it could be directed somewhere else if the mail is going through some other filters. Is your mail getting filtered by spamassassin or something and the log messages for that are being saved somewhere other than maillog?

Accepted by the system, usually for processing, spamassassin, clamav...

One more stupid question.

from=<xyz@eservices.school.edu>

This is the sender address, right?

My problem is I can't find the message anywhere in abc's account.

Do you have any spamassassin or clamav log files in /var/log ? If you do then look in them at the date of the missing mail to see if they rejected it.

If mail is working ok most of the time then it probably either got deleted by a filter or by the user.

As per Habitual, 'Sent' means successfully delivered to the next system in line eg school2.edu, but to find out what that system did with it you will have to check the logs on that system ... and so on down the line.
Good luck

the sender (I mean the server) cannot guarantee anything, it knows only if it was passed to the next relay. If you want to know if it was arrived/read you need to request return receipt from the "other", receiver side.

The log files posted by the OP show that the mail was send to a local mailbox, it wasn't getting sent to another server.

And not only that.
The "to=\\abc" means that there is a .forward file in abc's home that apart from delivering mail locally to abc, it also forwards it to someone else.

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