[PLUG] Remaining Mail Issues Need Fixing

[chris (fool) mccraw]

On Sat, Jan 24, 2009 at 08:12, Rich Shepard <rshepard at appl-ecosys.com> wrote:
>   We have two remaining issues with e-mail, and I would like advice and
> suggestions from more experienced network admins on how to resolve them.
>
>   1) I use alpine as my MUA. Since the machine successfully rebooted
> yesterday and returned on-line there is a very long delay after I press C-x
> to send the message; 15-30 seconds. It used to be virtually instantaneous.
> The ~/mail directory where copies are stored has 700 perms. Those should be
> what they were before. Where should I start looking for a reason for this
> delay in sending?
>
>   2) My wife's MUA is thunderchicken on her laptop (Xubuntu). Since the
> network was brought back up she can send me messages, but cannot retrieve
> received messages from /var/spool/mail/. The message displayed on her
> monitor is, "Sending of password did not succeed. Mail server salmo
> responded: unable to process from lines (envelopes), change
> recognition modes or check for corrupted mail drop." A long time ago I set
> up poppler so she can retrieve mail over the local wireless connection. The
> current poppler package is installed. Where do I start looking for the
> clogged pipe on this issue?

the answer to both question is, in the system logs.  both poppler and
your MTA (not sure what slackware uses these days...probably postfix,
qmail, or sendmail i'd think, anyway, for this answer it doesn't
matter) should leave droppings in the logs.  if you have a separate
logfile for mail, they should even both be in there.

the "long sending delay" sounds like an MTA problem--sendmail
definitely used to do this if it had trouble with hostnames (when i've
experienced similar delay, it's been my own host that there's been
trouble doing DNS resolution of--localhost or the hostname sendmail is
configured to use for the system's hostname).

anyway, there's somewhere to start looking.  post logs if you got 'em
and they don't make things obvious (in the case of poppler i'd be
looking for failed login attempts or similar)