I have a small domain with multiple hosts. Sendmail is set up to forward all locally generated mail (mostly mail to root@localhost
generated by cron jobs) to a central "mail hub", using
define(`MAIL_HUB', `somehost.mydomain.org')
in sendmail.mc
. Recently I had a problem with the mail server on the remote end, so that It would not accept mail from this host. This caused sendmail to drop all mail. From /var/log/maillog
:
sendmail[3133]: n4461S5s003133: n4461S5t003133: return to sender: Service unavailable
sendmail[3133]: n4461S5t003133: to=root, delay=00:00:00, xdelay=00:00:00, mailer=relay, pri=34772, relay=XXXXX.org. [91.184.38.153], dsn=5.0.0, stat=Service unavailable
sendmail[3133]: n4461S5s003133: Losing ./qfn4461S5s003133: savemail panic
All mails generated during this time were dropped and lost forever.
How can I prevent this? Ideally I'd like sendmail to try again laiter or eventually to save the mail to a local file as a last resort.