delay in sending out emails

[nuohai]

I have a FreeBSD 8.2 as email server. I found that people receive my emails that were 2 to 4 days old.

How can I figure out the problem?

Thank you so much.

 

[DutchDaemon]

Watch for 4xx errors in /var/log/maillog. They will usually show why the email is deferred. Tackle the problems you find there, if they are indeed yours.

Something like [cmd=]grep dsn=4 /var/log/maillog[/cmd] should produce some results.

 

[nuohai]

thanks for your reply.

I tried that, but permission denied.

I also tried to see the status of sendmail by 'service sendmail status'
It shows sendmail is not running, sendmail_clientmqueue is not running.

I tried

cd /etc/mail/
make start

but permission denied.

Is that meaning I should have administrator start sendmail?

thanks

 

[nuohai]

thanks! problem solved by restrarting sendmail.

I have another question: how to check if I missed any email sent from/to me? I would guess there have been a few days that sendmail was not running, since people received emails that were 4 days old.

Last night when I was checking sendmail_queue, it showed 0. Is this meaning at least I didn't miss any mail sent out from me? For other people who tried to send emails to me from other email servers, their email servers should have a resendmail process to resend emails. Am I understanding right? thank you so much!

Watch for 4xx errors in /var/log/maillog. They will usually show why the email is deferred. Tackle the problems you find there, if they are indeed yours.

Something like [cmd=]grep dsn=4 /var/log/maillog[/cmd] should produce some results.

 

[DutchDaemon]

Most mail servers will try to deliver mail for 5 days straight. After that, it's probably gone. There is no way of finding out what other people did not manage to send to you if your Sendmail wasn't running (hence: logging).

 

[ecazamir]

Indeed, DutchDaemon, the local system administrator can't see what mails didn't arrive. But the persons who weren't able to send mail to your domain should have received a non-delivery notice, if they are using proper mail servers, with queues. Only if the partners are using poor web-based solutions for eMail hosting, they won't notice a not-delivered mail.