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I have questions about mail,

  1. I am using following command on my linux account of my compnay

    mail -s 'Hi' [email protected]

But I dont receive any emails, where as did not receive any error while executing the above command, so whats going on and what is happening.

  1. what email id do mail use to send the email by default. Is there any way or command to print this by default user id.
  • Can you include the contents of (or last 5-10 lines of) the `/var/log/maillog` file please? – chown Sep 09 '11 at 20:04
  • Also, please run `mailq` and show the output of that command. – chown Sep 09 '11 at 20:04
  • @chown Ok. I was using Ctrl-D. But now I tried using '.' but still it doesnt work. –  Sep 09 '11 at 20:22
  • @chown: Output mailq; can not chdir(/var/spool/mqueue/): Permission denied Program mode requires special privileges, e.g., root or TrustedUser. –  Sep 09 '11 at 20:23
  • Is there any way I could become TrustedUser other than root. –  Sep 09 '11 at 20:25
  • run: `sudo mailq` or `sudo su -` then `mailq`. Also, do you have `mailx` installed? – chown Sep 09 '11 at 20:29
  • Or you could `chmod 755 /var/spool/mqueue`. But in order to do that, you would need to be root or sudo'd. – chown Sep 09 '11 at 20:58

2 Answers2

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mail is a mail user agent (MUA), you also need a mail tranport agent (MTA), such as postfix, to deliver non-local mail. The MTA has to be configured appropriately, many ISPs require that mail be routed through their mail servers. This usually means configuring your MTA to treat theirs as smarthosts or relays rather than attempting to deliver mail directly to the mailserver for the recipient's domain.

Have you checked your MTA configuration and checked your logfiles for messages about delivery failures.

RedGrittyBrick
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0

Suggestions:

You need to hit enter, then put a . on the next line, then hit enter again and the mail should get sent. Like so:

[root@host ~ ]# mail -s "test" [email protected]
This will be in the body of the email
Cc: [email protected]
.
[root@host ~ ]#

The . on its own line tells the mail command that you are done writing the body of the email and acts as an EOF for the command.

Another way to do it is:

[root@host ~ ]# echo "This will be the body of the email" | mail -s "This is the subject" [email protected]

And another method:

[root@host ~ ]# mail -s "This is the subject" [email protected] < /home/me/fileText_for_emailBody.log

This uses the contents of /home/me/fileText_for_emailBody.log as the body of the email.

chown
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  • I just stumbled on this because I'm having a similar problem but my e-mails are hanging while using your 3rd option with the < /path/to/file.txt addition to the mail command. If I use control+d or a period they do go through. I even put a lone period in the text file i'm using to see if that work work. And I'm stuck. – mosiac Jul 26 '12 at 16:25