Do you have super-user access? If so, the mail will be stored in files according to your system configuration (you don't tell us the distribution) but it's likely to be under /var somewhere. Perhaps one of these:-
- /var/mail/queue
- /var/spool/mail
- /var/spool/mqueue
..... or something similar. Have a look at the manual page for
sendmail to see if that gives you some more clues. You can then check to see if there are files in there at all (might see something whilst it is processing) or files over 24-hours old. You can use the
find command for that quite nicely.
Does that help you? I'm still not convinced your plan is a good one though. What we do is to have a heartbeat e-mail. Essentially we send a note on a regular basis and someone/something alerts if it hasn't arrived.
Another alternate is you could drive the query from another server. You could write error checking there to alert you if:-
- You can't connect
- You can't run the job
- There is pending e-mail
If you can perform the error checking on this other server, then you could hope that it would be able to notify you, although it still depends on the common infrastructure not being the point of failure.
Robin