Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!DNguest From: Tony C. Cheng, 5-7978@ETS Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc Subject: Anyone has experience on this? Message-ID: <49783@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu> Date: 4 Jul 90 22:41:40 GMT Sender: DNguest@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu Lines: 75 Following is a description of the mail problem happened on our Unix System V box which we use as a StarGROUP unix server. If anyone ever encountered problem like this one, please tell me the solutions you'd applied. Any hint will be hightly appreciated! ps. Currently I'm thinking that if I replace the System V /bin/mail with a BSD mail, it might work. ================== From: ROSE::TCHENG "Tony C. Cheng, 5-7978@ETS" 27-JUN-1990 10:14:09.80 To: JACOBSJ CC: @TEK Subj: mail receiving on wright01 I've been studying and thinking about the mail receiving problem in the past few days, it is about time to give out a full description of the problem, and I want to emphasize that the steps toward a solution is getting closer. Some directories and file on wright01 are involved here: /usr/lib/mailx/mailx.rc /usr/lib/sendmail.cf /usr/spool/mqueue /usr/mail/ /usr/mail/.lock /etc/profile The Unix System V uses its "mail" program for local e-mailing, but when remote machines get involved, users need to use "mailx" in conjuctions with "sendmail" program instead of "mail" for e-mailing. The way "mail" works is that each time someone sends out a mail to another user on the same host, the mail message will be first queued in the /usr/spool/mqueue directory in two parts: dfAAxxxxxxx --- message body qfAAxxxxxxx --- message header ("x" is a digit representation) Then the parts will be composed as a whole text again and put in a /usr/mail/ file under the mail receiver's username, and the system will prompt the user about mail arrival. The local mail in this fashion was working fine on wright01. The problem comes from mails sent by remote hosts. Mails from outside world will only be held in the /usr/spool/mqueue directory for a while and then bounced back to their senders. From those queued messages, we know that wright01 can definitely receive incoming mails from other hosts, but however, they cannot be appended to the /usr/mail/ file. Instead, the received mail will only cause wright01 to create a .lock file under that /usr/mail directory. Which means that, for some reasons, "mailx" fails to recognize the /usr/mail as a postoffice or create a /usr/mail/ file to hold message for that user. As a result, all we need to do is to make setups for "mailx" or "sendmail", so "mailx" knows to use /usr/mail as postoffice to distribute mails. John, tonight I will need to shutdown wright01 again to test some new configuration in /usr/lib/mailx/mailx.rc, /usr/lib/sendmail.cf and /etc/profile. Hope that I will get better outcome. _Tony ----------------------------------------------------------------------* Tony C. Cheng Education Technology Services Indiana University