[PLUG] Sendmail Severe Errors

Rich Shepard rshepard at appl-ecosys.com
Sat Aug 2 13:38:53 UTC 2014


   I am still trying to find what broke a month or so ago that caused
logwatch.pl to not send me a daily report. I've posted the situation on the
logwatch forum (hosted on sourceforge.net) but have seen no reply.

   The forum has a thread where others report this problem, but the solution
for a few of them, the way the sendmail command is written, is not the issue
here. However, I think the issue is with sendmail (which is the postfix
version here) for the following two reasons:

   1.) As root I can run /etc/cron.daily/0logwatch (which is a soft link to
/usr/share/logwatch/scripts/logwatch.pl) and the report displays in the
virtual terminal. This tells me the problem is communicating the results to
me, not running the script.

   2.) In the resulting report the past few days I've seen this section:

  --------------------- sendmail Begin ------------------------

  SEVERE ERRORS
  -------------

  System Error Messages:
      savemail: cannot save rejected email anywhere: 2 Time(s)

  Lost Queue Files:
      ./qfs71DapiW022254: savemail panic
      ./qfs71BjKDF019769: savemail panic

  Total SEVERE ERRORS:  4

  ---------------------- sendmail End -------------------------

which I now believe reflect the problem.

   In logwatch.pl the MAILTO variable is set to root and there's an alias
here that directs all of root's mail to my inbox. In both
/usr/share/logwatch/default.conf/logwatch.conf and
/etc/logwatch/conf/logwatch.conf is the directive
 	mailer = "/usr/sbin/sendmail -t"
which is the syntax that resolved the issue for others on that logwatch
forum thread.

   Every now and then, when logwatch was working from cron.daily, it would
send a report that it tripped a postfix UCE filter and was not delivered.
But, I received a message telling me that. Now I get nothing.

   How do I use the sendmail report above to find the source of the problem
so it can be fixed? If it matters, I'm running postfix-2.11.1 here with
dovecot-2.2.13.

Rich




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