On Tue, May 28, 2013 at 9:51 AM, Bill Oliver <vendor@billoblog.com> wrote:


On Mon, 27 May 2013, Richard Vickery wrote:

Sorry for the HTML code; I'm trying to fix it. However, I yum-installed mutt and attempted to send the following email:
[snip]

Does this happen with all email, or only email to fedoraproject?

Here's the obligatory "Hmmm... It works out of the box for me..." I hate reading that when I have a problem, but I feel obligated to let you know.

I'm not a mutt expert -- I have it installed only so I can script broadcast emails from the command line -- but my impression is that it's like pine in that it's a client, not a server, and  uses the mail server software you have installed for sending (e.g. sendmail, postfix), and hands off to that.  The error message you gave looks to me like a server issue.  Do you have another client on that box, like alpine, that does work?

Since the problem is a timeout, it sounds like the server is talking to fedoraproject, which means, to me, that mutt has handed it off.

Here are some things that have screwed me over in the past:

1) The mailinglist only accepts mail with your name from one ip address or domain, and this ain't it.  Usually this gets a better error message than timeout, but I've seen it.

2) There's an authentication problem (this is the most common for me, particularly if I'm doing POP/IMAP stuff involving dovecot).  Again, this usually gets a better error message than a timeout, but I've seen it there, too.  A lot depends on how the servers are configured.

3) You do not have your client pointing to the correct server/MTA.  I've done this when I've had multiple domains and multiple servers behind one firewall/router.  I've also made the mistake of using "localhost" for my server when I didn't mean to, and had installed, but not set up, sendmail on my laptop as part of a default setup.  So, I kept trying to debug my "real" mail server and couldn't find a problem, when in fact my mail client was trying to use my unconfigured laptop as a server. Doh.  That's a day out of my life I'll never get back.

4) You do not have your domain correctly denoted, and so there's a mismatch (e.g. you are sending from "billoblog.com" but you are attaching "localdomain.")  That can cause some problems later on, though usually for me the error message tells me that the reverse lookup failed at the recipient site.  I also get this on occasion when sending mail through an ISP that returns the ISP domain on reverse lookup.

5) Fedoraproject's MTA was actually down when you tried to talk to it, and you just have bad timing.  It will clear up later.

Since this is a bit of a touchy mailinglist culture here, I assume you'll get all sorts of flak if you send an empty test email using a direct sendmail or postfix command. Maybe there's a "test" address that the mailinglist advertises for debugging.  If so, I'd just do the old tried and true "/usr/sbin/sendmail -v somewhere@somedomain < /dev/null "  and see what you get.  If *that* times out, then it's not mutt that's the problem.

billo
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I went to a site for configuration which suggested I install these three packages, one of which we (Fedora) have abandoned in 2008 (may not be these packages):

fetchmail msmtp procmail

Thanks for the help,

Sorry again about the HTML,

Richard