Where are the logs?
The default location depends on your linux/unix system, but the most common places are
- /var/log/maillog
- /var/log/mail.log
- /var/adm/maillog
- /var/adm/syslog/mail.log
If it’s not there, look up /etc/syslog.conf. You should see something like this
mail.* -/var/log/maillog
sendmail writes logs to the mail facility of syslog. Therefore, which file it gets written to depends on how syslog was configured.
If you system uses syslog-ng (instead of the more “traditional” syslog), then you’ll have to look up your syslog-ng.conf file. You’ll should something like this:
# This files are the log come from the mail subsystem.
#
destination mail { file("/var/log/mail.log"); };
destination maillog { file("/var/log/maillog"); };
destination mailinfo { file("/var/log/mail.info"); };
destination mailwarn { file("/var/log/mail.warn"); };
destination mailerr { file("/var/log/mail.err"); };
Unable to send out emails?
One of the most common reason I’ve seen for a freshly installed sendmail not being able to send out emails is the DAEMON_OPTIONS being set to listen only on 127.0.0.1
See /etc/mail/sendmail.mc
dnl #
dnl # The following causes sendmail to only listen on the IPv4 loopback address
dnl # 127.0.0.1 and not on any other network devices. Remove the loopback
dnl # address restriction to accept email from the internet or intranet.
dnl #
DAEMON_OPTIONS(`Port=smtp,Addr=127.0.0.1, Name=MTA')dnl
If that’s your case, remove the “Addr=127.0.0.1” part, rebuild your conf file and you’re good to go!
DAEMON_OPTIONS(`Port=smtp, Name=MTA')dnl
[root@server]$ m4 sendmail.mc > /etc/sendmail.cf
[root@server]$/etc/init.d/sendmail restart
If you’ve been making changes to /etc/sendmail.cf manually thus far (instead of the *.m4 file) you can make similar changes in /etc/sendmail.cf. The offending line will look like this:
O DaemonPortOptions=Port=smtp,Addr=127.0.0.1, Name=MTA
Change it to:
O DaemonPortOptions=Port=smtp, Name=MTA