Hello everyone,

I am using Slack 12.2 and I am not able to read my local mails. For instance, I use an user X session to send a mail to another user Y. When I type `mail` in the user Y session, I got the message `no mail for Y`. The permission for rc.sendmail is set to 755. Any idea about what's going on? Thanks.

Do you have procmail installed?

Lyle.

Yep, I have procmail installed. I even tried a re-install of that package but it did not change anything to the problem.

Exactly how are you trying to use sendmail?

First, I would make sure sendmail was running (ps aux | grep sendmail), if it isn't, start it: /etc/rc.d/rc.sendmail start
Test if sendmail works: echo "<content>" | sendmail -s "<subject>" <user>

where user should at this point be a local user. I.e. I'm loged in as my regular user, and type
echo "Test" | sendmail -s "Testmail" root
then I would log in as root and check my e-mail.

Does this work?

The (ps aux | grep sendmail) gave:

The echo (echo "Test" | sendmail -s "Testmail" root) gave:

And naturally, when I logged in as root, there was no mail for root.

Any new suggestions?

I get the same error when I do
/etc/rc.d/rc.sendmail stop
before trying to send e-mails. I doubt this is what's wrong, since sendmail is running according to ps.

Of course you could try to run '/etc/rc.d/rc.sendmail start' and retry sending emails.

Other then that, I think it might be something wrong with inetd, but inetd are used when remote clients are sending email to the local machine, not when a local user sends an email to another local user, so that sound unlikely as well. Anyway, I haven't used inetd in a few years so I can't help you there. Other then these tips, I can't really think of something else to be wrong.

Does anyone else have some ideas about the possible source of the issue?

DISCLAIMER: I don't really know shit about sendmail, this might be bad advice.

I've had similar problems, I think it was due to erroneous permissions, and the warning message:
"WARNING: RunAsUser for MSP ignored, check group ids (egid=100, want=25)
can not chdir(/var/spool/clientmqueue/): Permission denied
Program mode requires special privileges, e.g., root or TrustedUser."
seem to hint at that as well.

What are your permissions on /usr/sbin/sendmail? It ought to be owned by root:smmsp with 2555 for setgid.
And /var/spool/clientmqueue should be owned by smmsp:smmsp and be group writable.

So, this might fix your problem:

chown root:smmsp /usr/sbin/sendmail
chmod 2555 /usr/sbin/sendmail
chown smmsp:smmsp /var/spool/clientmqueue
chmod 770 /var/spool/clientmqueue

(And maybe the user who is trying to run sendmail has to be a member of the smmsp group, somehow that doesn't seem quite right...)

I checked the permissions and ownerships of all the files you mentioned and they are exactly set as you described them. So obviously, the issue doesn't reside in the files permissions and ownerships. One more thing I've noticed is that when I try to open the mailbox of the user X using `mutt`, I get a message saying: /var/spool/mail/X : No such file or directory (errno=2)

The "-s" bit is what's causing the errors
This is because the sendmail command is failing and not sending to that user so the directory isn't created.

Try this as user Y:

to see if mail is being sent from Y to X.

I logged in as user Y and I did echo "Hello user X" | sendmail X". The result was:

/home/Y/dead.letter... Saved message in /home/Y/dead.letter

And of course, the `su - X; mail` gave:

No mail for X

The next test is to see if sendmail thinks it's deliverable to user X with :

Next have a look at the end of the file /var/log/mailog to see what's reported.

su -c "sendmail -bv X" gave:

X... deliverable: mailer local, user X

and this is the last line of maillog:

Jun 8 06:41:39 FreeCity sendmail[12237]: gethostbyaddr(192.168.0.102) failed: 1

Ok - sendmail appears to know about the user but not the host. I take it your host is FreeCity and it's IP is 192.168.0.102.

Probably the easiest fix is, as root, run netconfig and set up your host name, IP/DHCP settings and domain name. It may be easiest after all that to reboot if thats possible but if not you may be OK by running "/etc/rc.d/rc.inet1 restart" and "/etc/rc.d/rc.sendmail restart" as root.

Next try the echo "Hello" | sendmail X from user Y and check the bottom of /var/log/maillog if there is a failure.

It would appear that possibly something is wrong in the /etc/hosts file as sendmail is trying to get the name of your host from it's IP address and failing.