I have a box that recently stopped sending emails. Originally I thought it was because we changed the firewall and the rules where probably not set up correctly. But upon further review I see that it is trying to connect back to the loop back address instead of connecting to the mail server. It use to work fine, not sure what changed, but I really don't know mail that well and the man page was not much help on this one. This is what I get when I try to send a test email.

somebox:[/root]$echo "test" | mail user@company.com -v
root... Connecting to [127.0.0.1] via relay...
root... Deferred: Connection refused by [127.0.0.1]

I don't understand why it would be trying to send things back to it's self. I don't have mailx on this particular system. It does not run sendmail or any other mail server for security reasons. The server does resolve the name of the mail server and is able to ping it.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Bob

You might check the man page for the name and location of the config file (something like /etc/mailrc) and then look for a line with 'smtp' (something like set smtp=localhost which should be changed to reflect the desired smtp server, like set smtp=smtp.isp.com). Bear in mind that many mailers are not intelligent enough to submit to remote smtp servers, so what you're looking for may not be possible with your present software. In the worst case, you can look for a program called nail which does have this functionality.