Sending mail in the dead.letter file


 
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# 1  
Old 03-18-2008
Sending mail in the dead.letter file

Sorry for this one ladies and gents, it's probably very easy but I don't know how to, sound familiar :-)

I'm using sendmail on a web server that sends some mail through forms, not many.

I've got sendmail configured to use our networks relay host and everything was working well.

The power went off on the weekend, and when I came in I noticed that all mail was bouncing, the reason being that I hadn't configured the networking settings properly and the FQDN of the web server was not being recognised by the mail server and not allowing the mail to go through it.

I've sorted that out now, and I can send mail through the relay again.

Question is how do I send the emails that are in the dead.letter file?

mailq is empty

:-(

Any help or tips will be gratly appreciated.
# 2  
Old 03-18-2008
dead.letter is the result when the message could not even enter the mail queue.

Personally I would simply alert the users to this problem and suggest they review their dead.letter files for messages they really want to send. Chances are there are duplicates and triplicates which they were sending while you were wondering what was up with the mail.

I guess dead.letter is a standard mbox file so the formail manual (if you have that) should be helpful.
era
# 3  
Old 04-23-2008
If i do not want any of the email - can i just simply delete the dead letter file from the directory?
# 4  
Old 04-23-2008
Yes, you can delete it if you don't want to keep it. It's basically just a mechanism for recovering lost messages in case there was a bug in the mail software or something. It will probably reappear if you use buggy mail software, but at least now you know what it's for.
# 5  
Old 04-23-2008
Thanks - will delete it and save disk space!
 
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