sendmail bombarding logs

[Cameron Simpson]

On 02Jan2016 22:11, Sudhir Khanger <ml at sudhirkhanger.com> wrote:
>On Saturday 02 Jan 2016 2:32:36 PM Ed Greshko wrote:
>> Well, since your cronjob is a program which performs an email function and
>> since those errors being reported are referencing files in your directory I
>> would say the most likely cause is the interaction between your cronjob and
>> an MTA  and not anything having to do with files in /etc.
>>
>> You said that installing sendmail "did clear up a lot of entries".  So, are
>> you still getting errors?
>>
>> As I said, the rss2email package may work best with "sendmail" as opposed to
>> another mta such as postfix.

It really ought to, but see below.

>I see no sendmail error after I remove the r2e entryl from the crontab.
>rss2email should not be using sendmail.
>I start getting sendmail and crond entries as soon as I add r2e to the
>crontab. I see that one crond entry is made every time a cronjob is run.

Have you considered that cron sends an email if the cron job produces any 
output? Is rss2email silent or noisy? Does it have an option to "only report 
errors"?

>Now that being solved.

Probably not solved. Observe:
>[sudhir at fedora ~]$ journalctl -b | grep sendmail
>Jan 02 21:00:11 fedora sendmail[7216]: My unqualified host name (fedora)
>unknown; sleeping for retry
>Jan 02 21:01:11 fedora sendmail[7216]: unable to qualify my own domain name
>(fedora) -- using short name

You probably need to define your mail system's name in your sendmail config.

>Jan 02 21:01:12 fedora sendmail[7216]: u02FVC8x007216: from=sudhir, size=598,
>class=-60, nrcpts=1, msgid=<201601021531.u02FVC8x007216 at fedora>,
>relay=sudhir at localhost
>Jan 02 21:01:12 fedora sendmail[7216]: u02FVC8x007216: to=sudhir,
>ctladdr=sudhir (1000/1000), delay=00:00:00, xdelay=00:00:00, mailer=relay,
>pri=138598, relay=[127.0.0.1] [127.0.0.1], dsn=4.0.0, stat=Deferred:
>Connection refused by [127.0.0.1]

Your sendmail is trying to send email via SMTP to localhost. Which is not 
answering.

There are two probalems here:

1: You may want to make your local sendmail accept connections from localhost 
for programs too dumb to invoke the local sendmail program.

2: You definitely need to configure your local sendmail to have a better 
outbound relay that 127.0.0.1, which is itself (==> mail loop).

Cheers,
Cameron Simpson <cs at zip.com.au>