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up vote 2 down vote favorite

I am trying to get postfix working, and when I test it using mail user I enter the subject, message, ect and get the following error:

mail: /usr/sbin/sendmail: No such file or directory
Can't send mail: sendmail process failed

Why is it talking about sendmail? I deleted that a long time ago and am using postfix. Is it still hanging around somewhere and the mail command thinks it should be using sendmail?

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Could you post the output from postconf –n – Bart De Vos May 12 '11 at 17:58
I get: postconf: warning: ???n: unknown parameter – Zed Said May 12 '11 at 18:15

3 Answers

up vote 4 down vote accepted

The postfix package on Debian actually includes an /usr/sbin/sendmail executable that functions as a compatibility interface (see man sendmail when postfix is installed).

Check ls -l /usr/sbin/sendmail* in case it was renamed or reinstall the postfix package so you get the wrapper in place.

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I try to reinstall, and I get an error talking about sendmail: Errors were encountered while processing: sendmail-base E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1) – Zed Said May 12 '11 at 18:20
Should I just install sendmail-base on its own? – Zed Said May 12 '11 at 18:27
You shouldn't install any part of sendmail really, just postfix. Please post the output of dpkg-query -L postfix | grep sendmail. – Eduardo Ivanec May 12 '11 at 18:35
Thanks, running that gives me: /usr/sbin/sendmail /usr/share/man/man1/sendmail.1.gz /usr/lib/sendmail – Zed Said May 12 '11 at 19:05
And yet ls -l /usr/sbin/sendmail returns "No such file or directory"? I'd say your install is botched in some specific way that also causes reinstall to malfunction - try backing up all config files by hand, then apt-get remove --purge postfix (do back up first!) and finally apt-get install postfix. – Eduardo Ivanec May 12 '11 at 19:08
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up vote 2 down vote

If you do not have /usr/sbin/sendmail, check if after installing postfix package, you have:

/usr/sbin/sendmail.postfix

If you do, simply make a symlink:

ln -s /usr/sbin/sendmail.postfix /usr/sbin/sendmail
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up vote 1 down vote

The postfix installation is probably broken. Try this:

sudo aptitude reinstall postfix
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Did this, and it didn't fix the issue. – Zed Said May 12 '11 at 18:15

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