[Mailman-Users] MTA problem (was "mail not being sent/received")

[Brad Knowles]

At 6:23 PM -0500 2005-02-17, jpsota at gmail.com wrote:

>  Isn't /var/log/maillog an smtp-level log?

	Typically, yes.  It should be written by the syslog daemon, based 
on messages sent to syslog by the MTA.

>                                             I'm under the impression
>  that it has nothing to do with mailman in particular.

	Other than the fact that an incoming message has to hit the MTA 
before the MTA can pass that off to Mailman, and that Mailman has to 
hand off an outgoing message to the MTA before it can be delivered to 
the remote server, you are correct.

>                                                        I'm mentioning
>  this because as I said in a previous message, it seems like mail isn't
>  even reaching the system because when I send mail directly to a user
>  account on that system, there is no record of such a message in
>  /var/log/maillog. Likewise, there's no record of anything when I send
>  to a mailman list.

	That sounds like you've got an MTA problem.

>>          Check the logs in /usr/local/mailman/logs/smtp and
>>  /usr/local/mailman/logs/smtp-failure, and compare those against the
>>  MTA logs.
>
>  My smtp logs only contain outgoing messages sent by crond -- nothing
>  incoming. I don't have a smtp-failure log.

	Outgoing messages sent by crond to ... where?  Are they being 
sent to mailing lists or mailing list recipients?

>  My server is behind a router and SMTP's default port is 25. Therefore,
>  I've forwarded incoming requests on port 25 to the server. However,
>  there may be something else I need to do to get incoming mail to be
>  recognized.

	You'll need to make sure that your upstream ISP does not block 
all incoming port 25 connections.  This is becoming more and more 
common for residential and other dynamic IP address connections.

	You'll also need to make sure that the DNS is set up correctly to 
direct all incoming mail for you to the IP address of your router, 
which should then be redirected to your server.

>  My MTA is a local sendmail install. How do I increase debugging support?

	You need to modify the configuration file for sendmail.  This 
might be a direct modification, or you might need to modify a 
sendmail.mc file, which would then be re-compiled into your 
sendmail.cf.  This is going to depend on your particular OS, your 
configuration, etc....


	If you want to make the modification directly to your 
sendmail.cf, you'll need to find the line that says "LogLevel=" and 
increase the number specified -- the higher the number, the more data 
that will be logged.  For what you're talking about doing, it is not 
likely that you would need to go above fourteen or fifteen.

	Once the line has been updated, you'll need to save the 
configuration file, and then stop and restart sendmail.

>  Note that the only way I can get an incoming mail entry to show up in
>  maillog is if I send mail locally on the system from, say, root to
>  foo, where foo is a non-root user on the same system. Otherwise, I see
>  nothing at all.

	Where is Mailman configured to send outgoing mail?  To your local 
sendmail installation, or direct to your upstream ISP?

>  So, unless I'm missing something, it looks like my problem is
>  independent of mailman.

	The problem does seem to be in the MTA, that's true.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad at stop.mail-abuse.org>

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

     -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
     Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755

   SAGE member since 1995.  See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.