Alexander Volovics wrote:
As I have been using postfix a long time I have forgotten
the little I knew about sendmail.
But I thought it would have been configured by default to allow
the mail from (ana)cron to work without problems and complaints.
On a laptop on which I have been trying out F8 test3 I decided to
not use my standard postfix/mutt/fetchmail/procmail setup but make
do with claws-mail instead.
So I just left sendmail (not needing it) with the default install
configuration.
To my surprise I see constant error messages when getting mail from
Mail Delivery Subsystem <MAILER-DAEMON@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Namely:
- Tried to mail output of jon 'cron daily', but mailer proces
(usr/bin/sendmail) exited with status 65
- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors -----
root
(reason: 553 5.5.4 <root@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>... Real domain name
required for sender address) (expanded from: root)
- relay localhost (127.0.0.1) may be forged
Eventually I do get the mail in /var/spool/mail/user and claws-mail
picks it up (again with a summary of the errors).
Wouldn't it be neater to configure sendmail to perform these simple
duties without these hiccups.
I expect that if /etc/aliases is not changed to deliver root's mail to
user the user might never get any cron mail and newbies might be
confused on seeing possible error messages when mail is delivered
to root.
A further irritation occurs when using 'mail' to send messages from
user to user. The do not arrive at /var/spool/mail/user but are dropped
as "dead.letter" in the users home directory
Is this mentioned somewhere. It should be.
Sendmail deduces the from: user's email address from the domain name of
the system. I am sure that it can be set properly in
/etc/mail/sendmail.*, but being a postfix user I don't care to check.
However, postfix also needs to be configured: on my desktop whose
hostname is numbat.demo.lan, mail sent with the mail command isn't
accessible outside my LAN because sensible folk reject/discard email
from domains they can't resolve.
Note that the mail command does little more than pretty-up the email and
feed it into sendmail's stdin. The beautification doesn't extend to
setting the from: address. cron simply used the mail command to send email.
--
Cheers
John
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