RE: Pine and sendmail (further news)

[Jim Jackson <nospam [at] scs.leeds.ac.uk>]

On Tue, 22 Feb 2000, Richard wrote:

> Jim 
> 
> > If you leave the smtp server entry unspecified in pine, it invokes 
> > sendmail directly and pipes in the message. This means you do not 
> >need to have sendmail running as a background deamon. 
> 
> AAAaaAArghhhh    (O'Reilly bat book falls on head) 
> 
> That works :-)  Don't know if it sends mail though.  Must be the  
> server settings in sendmail ?  Perhaps I need to use the - 
> opneedmailhelo  ??  To get it to send mail ? 
> 

You can see whats in the mail queue by using the command

 $ /usr/lib/sendmail -bp

This can often also be run as the command

 $ mailq

but it depedns on your distro/setup

You can send mail by editing a suitable RFC822 formatted message into a
file (The file must have at least a From: field a To: field a blank line and
some message) and piping it into the sendmail program....

 $ cat file | /usr/lib/sendmail -t -v

This makes sendmail attempt to deliver the mail according to the
configuration in the sendmail.cf file (usually /etc/sendmail.cf).
If it can't deliver it then it puts it in the mail queueu, usually in
/usr/spool/mqueue, as 2 files per queue entry.

You can attempt to deliver all queued mail by invoking sendmail (as root)

 $ /usr/lib/sendmail -v -q

the -v option tells sendmail to be verbose - it spits more output out than
it would do ordinarily - sometimes the output is very useful.

So bring up your internet connection and try running the sendmail queue
manually. 

The verbose output can be used to diagnose anyother probs you may have.