UNIX for Beginners Questions & Answers

My company has an email user group email address name that has 35 characters in front of the @ symbol where two of them are dashes. For some reason the mail command fails to send email to this address when I invoke it from the Linux command line. I don't understand the reason for the failure. Below is an example of what does not work and what works.

This does not work

Code:

echo "Test Email from Linux Server" | mail -s "Linux Test Email"   AA-BBBB-YadayaAdministrativeSystems@company.com

This works.

Code:

 
 echo "Test Email from Linux Server" | mail -s "Linux Test Email"  joe.sixpack@company.com

Moderator's Comments:

Please use CODE tags (not ICODE tags) for full line and multi-line sample input, sample output, and code segments.

RFC 5322 and RFC 5321 indicate that you can have 64 characters to left of "@".
So that is not your problem.

Unless you turned of logging, you should be able to see several sendmail entries for each email you sent - assuming your box is the one actively sending mail - in the /var/log/syslog file

I would check to be sure the address is not munged some by locale settings for example.

Any error messages? Entry in the system- / mail log file?

I'm not authorized to see the maillog file so I don't know if there are any errors in it. However, I have put in an incident with our in-house Linux admin and I have asked him to look at it. I also ran the mail command in Verbose mode (-v switch) but the Mail Delivery Report looked good to me. Is it possible that the operating system percieves the dashes in the email address as an attempt to use a metacharacter instead of a character that is part of the actual email address?

Probably not. Most email failures from well-formed addresses are the result of forwarding errors and such like. For example the receiving sendmail could have an IP block or some other issue. For completely wrong addresses, no such address kinds of things, should result in an error message emailed to the sender at some later point in time.

Difficult to say without seeing the logs, but I doubt it's the address (unless its legitimately wrong). Lots of things beyond your control happen when you send an email, as well - routing, spam filtering, mailbox sorting, and more. The problem might not even be on your machine but another hop further away.