Messages stuck in Postfix maildrop folder

Virtualmin
1

Hello. I have been troubleshooting an email delivery issue with my CentOS 5.x server. All of my virtual servers are using Google Apps for email so I never really took notice if the local mail delivery was working or not. But recently a client mentioned that email was not getting delivered from her website to external contacts.

The users site is using php mail() function which is using sendmail/postfix. After a bunch of troubleshooting I tracked the issue down to Postfix not routing the mails for some reason. The emails are just sitting in the maildrop folder. This is where I’m stuck because I havent touched the postfix configuration since initial install. Also I cant seem to find any logs for Postfix. I believe they should be in /var/log/mail.log but I dont see that, only /var/log/maillog which seems to be only for sendmail - but there is nothing relevant in that log anyway.

Also worth noting is that I dont have “mail for domains” enabled on any of the domains except the “admin/system” domain since the MX records for all the client domains are using Google Apps. I think this is likely part of the issue… But where to look next?

Thanks for any help!

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Also worth noting is that there are 3200+ emails in the maildrop folder. The php script mail() function is returning a “true” so that part is working. The outbound delivery is just not happening.

3

Howdy,

Anytime Postfix receives an email, it should show up in the mail logs. If you aren’t seeing anything at all in the mail logs when an email is sent, something is awry :slight_smile:

There would only be a maillog file on your server, the “mail.log” is for Ubuntu and Debian systems.

My recommendation would be to have someone attempt to send an email, then watch the mail logs to see what happens – and post the output you see to this thread here.

Sendmail shouldn’t be running on your server, it should be Postfix (unless that had been manually changed along the way). However, Postfix does have a command called “sendmail”, that may be confusing the issue…

-Eric