sendmail removed by update; mails cannot be sent

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sendmail removed by update; mails cannot be sent

Postby scalewaynoob » Sun Jun 12, 2016 8:09 pm

I run a small "C1" server on scaleway.com without any fancy experiments or configurations applied - just a straight vanilla ArchLinux armv7h install - which I keep updated regularly using "pacman -Syu". It seems that a recent update, possibly sometime the past few weeks, has removed sendmail(1) from the system rendering all mail agents relying on sendmail(1) (such as mail/mailx, mutt, php etc.) unable to send any mail out from the system:

[swn@scalewayc1 ~]$ mail -s test someone@myhostname.net
hello.
Cannot start "/usr/sbin/sendmail": executable not found (adjust *sendmail* variable)
"/home/swn/dead.letter" 6/112
... message not sent

Has anyone noticed this problem? Any fix for it? Any suggestions?
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Re: sendmail removed by update; mails cannot be sent

Postby crashmaster » Mon Jun 13, 2016 2:18 am

I don't believe that 'sendmail' will be deleted automagically without any warnings at least :o

What do you use for receiving mails?

To get a 'sendmail' command you have to install one of these packages:
$this->bbcode_second_pass_code('', '
extra/msmtp-mta
extra/postfix
extra/ssmtp
community/esmtp
community/exim
community/logwatch
community/nullmailer
community/quilt
')

For special configurations i also saw a standalone sendmail pkg in the AUR.

Which do you use?
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Re: sendmail removed by update; mails cannot be sent

Postby scalewaynoob » Mon Jun 13, 2016 11:06 am

I use opensmtpd. Sending mail out worked fine after installing and setting up opensmtpd. I believe postfix was pre-installed on this disk image, but I haven't removed the package. Is it possible some update remove postfix on my behalf (like f.e. how a recent update replaced letsencrypt with community/certbot)?
scalewaynoob
 
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Re: sendmail removed by update; mails cannot be sent

Postby scalewaynoob » Mon Jun 13, 2016 5:15 pm

Something indeed appears to have removed postfix through pacman.

[snw@scalewayc1 ~]# ls -l /etc/postfix/
total 36
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 28302 Apr 25 23:50 main.cf.pacsave
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 6199 Apr 25 22:38 master.cf.pacsave
scalewaynoob
 
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Re: sendmail removed by update; mails cannot be sent

Postby crashmaster » Wed Jun 15, 2016 3:54 am

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('scalewaynoob', 'I') believe postfix was pre-installed on this disk image, but I haven't removed the package.

I don't believe that postfix is preinstalled on an original Arch image. But it could be removed if you install one of the other mail packages. In this case pacman would show a warning message. This should also be documented in pacman.log.
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Re: sendmail removed by update; mails cannot be sent

Postby scalewaynoob » Sat Jul 02, 2016 12:02 am

For anyone who may be following this issue, after the following update was applied I noticed that sendmail(4) (which symlinks to smtpctl(4)) has been restored to the system:

[2016-07-02 01:49] [ALPM] upgraded opensmtpd (5.9.2p1-2 -> 5.9.2p1-3)

Sending mail using f.e. php or mail(4) works again.
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