not receiving emails from server

eliboone · 08-28-2003, 03:09 PM

One of my email accounts is not working properly. For some unknown reason I stopped receiving my order invoices on this account. I logged into the server and redirected the account to another account that works. It worked for a day but now I am not receiving the emails, and I know that they are some "floating around" out there. Is there a way to view these emails on my server? I am using Microsoft Outlook 2000. My server is running Red Hat 7.2.

Thank You in advance,

Eli Boone

kjcole · 08-28-2003, 03:21 PM

Off the top of my head (other than hair) dunno why you can't see your mail. Possibly a disk becoming full. Login to the server and do a df from the shell.

On the server your unread e-mail typically lives in /var/spool/mail/username. (One file per user, each named with their username.) It's a big, plain-text file, that you can examine using whatever tool you'd like.

eliboone · 08-28-2003, 03:48 PM

Thanks for the reply.

I have plenty of room on my server.

my mail is not in that directory. Do you have any other suggestions for where it might be? Right now I am going through everything I come across in those directories.

Thanks, Eli boone

kjcole · 08-28-2003, 03:52 PM

ls -l /var/spool/mail shows nothing? Not even empty files?

misc · 08-28-2003, 05:14 PM

More details needed.

Do you see the messages in the mail queue when you run mailq?

Do you see them being mentioned in the /var/log/maillog file?

eliboone · 08-29-2003, 09:16 AM

the ls -l /var/spool/mail command shows me the mail accounts. How can I view them?

The mqueue is empty. I looked through the log files but the latest date of the emails in there is August 10.

kjcole · 08-29-2003, 09:30 AM

I say again:

Quote:

Originally posted by kjcole

On the server your unread e-mail typically lives in /var/spool/mail/username. (One file per user, each named with their username.) It's a big, plain-text file, that you can examine using whatever tool you'd like.

Whatever tool you'd like includes but is not limited to: cat, pico, emacs, vi, more, less, most, OpenOffice, AbiWord, Kword, etc...

Just be careful if you're using an editor that can actually change the contents of the files, to NOT save when exiting.

misc · 08-29-2003, 09:44 AM

Quote:

The mqueue is empty. I looked through the log files but the latest date of the emails in there is August 10.

That sounds much like your mail server doesn't work anymore. I can't do the debugging for you. Have you sent yourself test messages yet? Can you connect to your mail server from the outside? From where do "your order invoices" come? Try simulating incoming messages and watch the mail server logs.

Based on your vague descriptions, your set-up is still pretty much unknown.

eliboone · 08-29-2003, 11:34 AM

I am using Plesk w/ Qmail. Anyone familiar w/ it. Sorry I did not let you all know before.

Thanks

misc · 08-29-2003, 11:47 AM

That doesn't sound like Red Hat Linux 7.2

and introduces additional sources of configuration mistakes and errors.