UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

The question is, Does the mail comman actually send using sendmail or something else?

So I am trying to test if sendmail is set up. I used...

cat testemail.txt | mail -s "test mail" myemail@test.com

I used my email though I didn't get an error, but didn't get the email either.

When I try any sendmail command I don't get an error but it doesn't respond and I have to cancel out.

I checked and there was a configuration file in /etc/mail, but there is no error log in /var/log.

So am I barking up two different trees or does the mail command use sendmail and I need to check out the configuration?

Well, the man pages for both are pretty reasonable. The sendmail can send, and so can mail, mailx, netscape, . . . .

Note that sendmail can be the local mail dameon server (-bd).

Also note that sending mail takes on many forms. One popular form is SMTP or ESMTP through tcp port 25, so any app can connect to a mail server locally or anywhere routable and send mail. I often use "telnet <mail_host> 25" in a script to send mail directly to a working mail server, when the local email is turned off or not properly installed.

It would be helpful if you told us what operating system you are on.

Sendmail is an MTA (Mail Transport Agent) and can accept mail from any MUA (Mail User Agent) or Mail Submission Program (MSP) not just the mail utility. The other common MTA on GNU/Linux systems is Postfix.