Ubuntu – how to set-up (very) simple sendmail

emailsendmail

I've been trying to get command line sendmail to work, but no success. I need this to output my anacron error somewhere.

I've installed the sendmail package. Configured /etc/aliases with:

root: me@gmail.com

But whenever I'm trying to send an email to any address (root, me@gmail.com) the sendmail log keeps telling me its relayed to 'localhost' and sent. Never to be found again. Some files get made in /var/mail/mqueue.

Log output:

root@tok:/var/mail# sendmail me@gmail.com test37

Feb 27 13:35:40 tok sendmail[23616]: r1RCZanW023616: from=tys, size=7, class=0, nrcpts=1, msgid=<201302271235.r1RCZanW023616@tok.mydomain.nl>, relay=root@localhost
Feb 27 13:35:40 tok sm-mta[23617]: r1RCZe41023617: from=<tys@tok.mydomain.nl>, size=289, class=0, nrcpts=1, msgid=<201302271235.r1RCZanW023616@tok.mydomain.nl>, proto=ESMTP, daemon=MTA-v4, relay=localhost [127.0.0.1]
Feb 27 13:35:40 tok sendmail[23616]: r1RCZanW023616: to=me@gmail.com, ctladdr=tys (1000/1000), delay=00:00:04, xdelay=00:00:00, mailer=relay, pri=30007, relay=[127.0.0.1] [127.0.0.1], dsn=2.0.0, stat=Sent (r1RCZe41023617 Message accepted for delivery)

Why does it decide that me@gmail.com should be delivered to localhost and does it never try to actually connect to gmail.com?

How should I configure this? I rather don't have any mailserver running at all. I just want the sendmail command to work and to forward my local root mails to mail address.
Can't sendmail just lookup the MX record for the rcpt domain on itself and just deliver it there?

I've also tried putting the alias in /root/.forward, tried forwarding to local file. All without success. I've ran newaliases after editing /etc/aliases. I've tried restarting init.d/sendmail.

Best Answer

I believe you mail is queued. Just try mailq and then sendmail -q or sendmail -q -v.

Possible is also, that email is being held because of unknown host. You need to have set localhost and your hostname in /etc/hosts

You normally don't need to use sendmail from command line to send emails, because it's not very convenient. You should use mailx or mutt

With mailx

echo you message  | mail -s subject user@host
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