Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with sendmail

Recommend a maillog analyzer

pwnguin — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 14:21:02 -0800

Recommend me a good sendmail log analyzer. We had a recent event where one of two servers running sendmail stopped sending mail, and built up a 7000 message queue before we noticed / fixed it. It's fixed now, but we don't know why it failed, and this part of the system is important but clearly neglected.

Can anyone recommend a good tool similar to Google Analytics or apache log analyzers, but for sendmail?

Bonus question: How big should a mail queue be before nagios should throw a warning or error?

Just need a folder of my own, that's all!

dance — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 05:04:10 -0800

Would anyone care to comment on the most practical way, given access to a command line Fedora box, I can obtain a copy of a folder and its contents? The box is connected to the net but I don't know enough Unix to, for example, get a tar of the folder and have the machine email me a copy. Although thinking about it, the folder is probably just a little too big for that. I have SSH and physical access but FTP isn't working, which is the whole problem in a nutshell, really. If anyone is interested in 10 minutes' brainstorming feel free to mefi mail me!

Automatically attach a footer to e-mail sent through Sendmail SMTP?

doomtop — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 13:12:11 -0800

Automatically attach a footer to e-mail sent through Sendmail SMTP? Looking documentation on how to automatically attach a customized footer to any e-mail relayed through my Sendmail server. Or any other SMTP server for that matter. Please help!

dropping the hostname in sendmail

brent_h — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 15:25:45 -0800

I need to change sendmail from sending emails from individual machines as user@host.domain.com to user@domain.com. any time I try and use unix mail ( among other things), and try and send an email, it always gets rejected as no host on this domain. I am NATed, so my internal DNS is fine for the local network, but all my machines are obviously aren't seen by the dns that my mail server in the ISP has.

This is on RHEL5 boxes. I had the same issue on osx, but It seems that they run postfix by default, vs sendmail on linux. This was a relatively easy fix in postfix, but so far, I haven't figured out sendmail after much googling.

On top of fixing this issue in the short term, Is this the correct way to handle this? Or is there some DNS fix that I am missing on my local network?

I would rather get sendmail working vs. installing postfix and disabling sendmail.

Responsible mail server use on a residential network?

Wild_Eep — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 13:51:14 -0800

How do I send email from a linux box from my residential cable modem connection? I've got a box running CentOS that fires a shell script every day. (The script backs up a friend's webserver via rsync) The log from the script is a text file that I turn into an email message. I want to send the message to my friend (at a gmail address).

When I send the messages, I get replies from gmail reading "The IP you're using to send email is not authorized."

It's implied that they want me to use my ISP's (TimeWarner) SMTP server, but I can't use that directly, mail relay restrictions and all.

I figured I could solve this problem by setting up Sender Policy Framework information for my domain. So I used I set up a TXT record for my domain with the appropriate SPF string.

Still, a few hours later, no go with GMail. Tried sending to another email address and found that my IP was listed with SpamHaus. Jumped through the requisite hoops there to attempt to remove my IP from their list.

I'm sure there's an obvious solution I'm overlooking.

Help a newbie stop sendmail spam

danblaker — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 13:17:35 -0800

How can I keep spammers from using my sendmail server? I recently inherited IT responsibility for a sendmail server (RedHat, sendmail 8.12.11.x), and I have to solve a small problem: Our server is being used to send phishing messages to external addresses (e.g. From: service@paypal.com) and to send generic spam from local addresses to other local addresses.

This box supplies the following legitimate services:

POP and Webmail access to a handful of people using accounts @myserver.com. These are roving users, so they need to relay.
Webmail-only access to ~200 people using accounts @mysecondserver.com. All legit webmail logins all come through a login interface on a different server, which passes the login credentials to the webmail CGI.

I'd like to lock the server down to allow only the legitimate scenarios described above. I'm pretty familiar with the webmail software, but I'm basically a newbie when it comes to sendmail. So far, I've verified that RELAY is only allowed for localhost; but I'm hesitant to try any of the other anti-spam techniques I've read about (e.g. SMTP AUTH), because I don't want to interrupt mail delivery for our legit users.

Sendmail problem: Keep getting NOQUEUE errors.

spilon — Fri, 01 Oct 2004 16:20:17 -0800

Sendmail problem: Keep getting NOQUEUE errors. [more inside] I've got Sendmail running on Linux.... generally problem free now for a couple of years or more. Recently some problems have cropped up that have me banging my head against the wall. Hoping someone can help?

The gist of it is that, while everything else seems to be running smoothly, mail from some places does not get thru. In many cases, I suspect this is due to spammers sending from fake domains, or something like that, but other times it is mail from someone well known, like eBay. I get this line in the logs a lot:

NOQUEUE: mxpool19.ebay.com [66.135.197.25] did not issue MAIL/EXPN/VRFY/ETRN during connection to MTA

Is there some sort of timeout setting I can tweak to clear up these log jams? As time goes on, its happening more and more and more, and I can't find any useful info on the subject from the usual sources. Originally I thought it was because I was using the Spamhaus blacklist, but I took that out and no change.

Any thoughts, theories, tips, tricks, or pointers would be most appreciated!

Using wildcards in virtusertable for sendmail: resources, pointers, and simple examples, please.

mwhybark — Wed, 07 Jul 2004 18:49:34 -0800

Using wildcards in virtusertable for sendmail: resources, pointers, and simple examples, please. Google-fu fails to provide examples that answer my questions. [emm eye] While the basic question, "Can I use wildcarded addresses at the server level with sendmail?" leads to the answer "of course, using vitusertable," the examples generally seen have broad scope:

myemail@somedomain.com -> %1@otherdomain.com

Compounding this is the sendmail-specific wildcarding scheme, which I still don't completely grok.

can I wildcard something like this?

[*+]foo[*+]@mydomain.com -> specificaddress@mydomain.com

(please note my also-primitive grasp of grep may mislead. I'm hoping that pseudo-address translates verbally to "any number and combination of characters on either or both sides of a specific string.")

So I think there are two parts here.

1. can I use virtusertable to set up subset-catchalls and direct them to the same domain?

2. can I get grep-style (grep-ish, what have you) wildcarding in virtusertable?

TIA!