Finger with sendmail
 

hi all,

I have sendmail running on my linux box, everything is working fine except
when the server is off line I lose mail im supposed to collect. Now I know
this mail is stored on the remote mail server and I need to issue the
'finger' command, anyone know how I set sendmail to automatically send this
command when my server is up and running again?

Cheers
Andy

Why do you need to issue a finger command? I've never heard of using finger to transfer email. When your Linux is offline, are you losing the email or just not collecting it. I'm curious to know what is telling the remote server to delete the email when your system is not online.

Well, you should have a secondary MX spooling your messages in case your primary goes offline. I think that's what you mean when you said "Now I know this mail is stored on the remote mail server". If so, your mail is not lost, it's just stored until your box comes back online. Usually a secondary will try to deliver any messages it has spooled at regular intervals. You can "force" the mail server to try to deliver by issuing the ETRN command. Something like this should work and should be easy enough to script:

$ telnet secondarymx.mydomain.com 25
ehlo mydomain.com
etrn mydomain.com
quit

HTH.