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I have Postfix installed and Sendmail is not running. I try to send mail using mail but the following warning comes up and the mail doesn't get sent:

postdrop: warning: unable to look up public/pickup: No such file or directory

This is also confusing me:

[root@ars etc]# postfix start
postfix/postfix-script: starting the Postfix mail system
[root@ars etc]# postfix stop
postfix/postfix-script: fatal: the Postfix mail system is not running

Please help! I need this working for Bugzilla.

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Your Postfix installation wasn't done properly. How was it installed? – womble Jan 5 '10 at 22:10
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migrated from stackoverflow.com Jan 5 '10 at 21:56

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3 Answers

up vote 1 down vote

Looks like either your /var/spool/postfix directory structure is missing a directory or the permissions are wrong. On CentOS it looks like:

drwx------ 2 postfix root     4096 Jan  5 16:49 active
drwx------ 2 postfix root     4096 Dec 23 16:18 bounce
drwx------ 2 postfix root     4096 Aug 14  2008 corrupt
drwx------ 4 postfix root     4096 Dec 16 08:55 defer
drwx------ 4 postfix root     4096 Dec 16 08:55 deferred
drwx------ 2 postfix root     4096 Aug 14  2008 flush
drwx------ 2 postfix root     4096 Aug 14  2008 hold
drwx------ 2 postfix root     4096 Jan  5 16:49 incoming
drwx-wx--- 2 postfix postdrop 4096 Jan  5 16:49 maildrop
drwxr-xr-x 2 root    root     4096 Dec 31 14:16 pid
drwx------ 2 postfix root     4096 Dec 31 14:39 private
drwx--x--- 2 postfix postdrop 4096 Dec 31 14:39 public
drwx------ 2 postfix root     4096 Aug 14  2008 saved
drwx------ 2 postfix root     4096 Aug 14  2008 trace

Check your /var/log/mail or /var/log/maillog file for error messages. The reason you can't stop postfix is because it's not starting in the first place.

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Mine looks exactly like that. – Chetan Jan 5 '10 at 22:27
Then Postfix thinks it's queue directories should be somewhere else. Post your complete main.cf in the question. – womble Jan 6 '10 at 3:16
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up vote 1 down vote

Try running 'postfix check' to see if it finds any obvious errors which will include incorrect permissions and should point you in the right direction.

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Is that an equivalent to "postsuper -s" (which is what I was going to suggest)? – Geoff Fritz Jan 5 '10 at 22:43
No, postsuper -s does different things to postfix check. – womble Jan 6 '10 at 3:17
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up vote 0 down vote

here is a GREAT tutorial on installing/configuring postfix and many plugins. It also has some key postfix testing techniques

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