Server mail doesn't work: notification of joblist job runs; mailing of search results

Description

Trouble receiving email that is sent from our Aleph prod server. The last time we received email was Tues, 4/11/17, and were expecting at least one email every day (success notification of jobs run via the job_list) since then.  And patrons are not receiving the OPAC search results which they save and mail.

We did the following as a test: 

> mail -s "Test mail" [xxxx@yyyy.edu]  <  [filename]

This mail command didn't give any error but it *should* have generated an email to xxxx@yyyy.edu, which, after 10 minutes, it did not. 

Resolution

The /var/log/mail.log had "Connection refused by" messages like this:

Apr 18 14:22:56 aio0001 sendmail[8225]: v3IIMubN008225: to=xxxx@yyyy.edu, ctladdr=root (0/0), delay=00:00:00, xdelay=00:00:00, mailer=relay, pri=42241, relay=[127.0.0.1] [127.0.0.1], dsn=4.0.0, stat=Deferred: Connection refused by [127.0.0.1] 

This indicates a problem with the unix sendmail function.  If mail was working previously and has stopped working, often simply restarting sendmail will fix the problem:

As root:

 /etc/init.d/sendmail restart  

See also the article:  " Email of search results not received ".

• Article last edited: 6-Apr-2017