Is your alias correct ? sympa: “|/home/sympa/bin/queue sympa”

Did you try by-passing sendmail ? Run the following unix command :

(echo "From: my@email" ; echo "Subject: help") | ~sympa/queue 0 sympa

If Sympa demon is running, you may receive the helpfile. Else, check if a file as been created in the sympa msg spool that contain :

X-Sympa-To: sympa
From: my@email
Subject: help

The ~sympa directory need rx access to others

    drwxr-xr-x   1 sympa    sympa     sympa

The queue program need setuid bit

1. rwsr-xr-x 1 sympa sympa queue

Spools need to be writable by sympa, especially the msg spool.

    drwxrwxr-x   2 sympa    sympa        2048 Sep 21 16:59 auth/
    drwxrwxr-x   2 sympa    sympa        1024 Sep 22 09:12 digest/
    drwxrwxr-x   2 sympa    sympa        1024 Feb 18  1999 expire/
    drwxrwxr-x   2 sympa    sympa        4096 Sep 22 09:43 mod/
    drwxrwxr-x   8 sympa    sympa       41984 Sep 22 10:41 msg/
    drwxr-xr-x   2 sympa    sympa      235520 Sep 22 10:41 outgoing/

smrsh is a secure shell for mailer prog, it is use for example in the red-hat 6.0 sendmail installation. In this case you must allow smrsh to run the queue program because smrsh prevent attack by checking a listing of safe binaries in a special directory (usually /etc/smrsh or /usr/adm/sm.bin )

You should restart the ./configure; make;mkae install process for Sympa with the following configure :

./configure --with-bindir=/etc/smrsh

Refer to sendmail FAQ for more information : http://www.sendmail.org/faq/section3.html#3.34

Note : smrsh is chrooted (in /etc/mail/smrsh for debian). You need to copy queue and bouncequeue in smrsh homedir, and of course aliases should point to the links.

Are thoses subscribers using nomail reception mode ? Sympa will log all call to sendmail program if you run it as :

sympa.pl --mail , Sympa will log when calling sendmail

Check the general state of your system.

• If you have a HW or kernel problem it may happen that some error messages didn't made it to the syslog. So don't forget to check the dmesg command!
• Check for high load - most sendmails will shutdown on load of >8-9 or so. Check this with the uptime command. I have seen surpricing results on some http servers. For details check the “Bat Book” (Sendmail, B. Costales) - look for the Ox/OX options (O QueueLA and O RefuseLA is the same).
• “Out of swap” is a explaination for almost everything. Even if you find no error msgs - high use of swap should be suspious. How to check it, depends on your OS... swapinfo -t, swapon -s, swap -l ... something like that. Of cause you should check, while trying again.

Ther are some internet ressources about Sympa with EXIM as a MTA.

• Exim 4 routers and transport for Sympa