Enabling mail program
Derek Broughton
derek at pointerstop.ca
Thu Sep 3 00:53:19 UTC 2009
Michael Satterwhite wrote:
> On Tuesday 01 September 2009 11:05:00 am Chris G wrote:
>> On Tue, Sep 01, 2009 at 10:55:59AM -0500, Michael Satterwhite wrote:
>> > I installed mailutils to enable command line email for scripts on my
>> > system. As a test, I ran
>> >
>> > mail -s "Test Message" michael at weblore.com < /dev/null
>> >
>> > It seemed to run without error, but I never received the test
>> > message. Obviously, I need to do something else to get the mail
>> > program
>> > working. Would someone be so kind as to let me in on the magic that I'm
>> > missing?
>>
>> By redirecting from /dev/null you sent yourself an empty message so it
>> doesn't seem to me to be very surprising that you received nothing.
>> Try redirecting from a text file of some sort.
>
> Actually, if you execute the command it will tell you that it sent a
> message with an empty body - which should have been received. There is no
> requirement that a message have a body.
I'm pretty sure there is. It can be null, but the SMTP dialog requires
headers, a blank line, some number of lines (which can be zero) of text, and
a line containing only "." to terminate the body. "mail" expects that "."
and I wouldn't have been surprised that redirecting from /dev/null didn't
work, because it doesn't have that ".", but...
>
> Regardless, I have tried it as well with a small text file. Same results.
So look at your syslog. It should be in there (this is masqmail, but other
MTAs should give something similar).
$ mail -s "test2" derek at localhost </dev/null
Null message body; hope that's ok
$ tail /var/log/syslog
Sep 2 21:48:47 morgen masqmail[14379]: 1Mj0VL-3jv-00 <= <derek at morgen> with
local
Sep 2 21:48:47 morgen masqmail[14380]: 1Mj0VL-3jv-00 => <derek at localhost>
with maildir
Sep 2 21:48:47 morgen masqmail[14380]: 1Mj0VL-3jv-00 completed.
--
derek
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