Thanks for the effort, but you either didn't really think about what I had written or I didn't describe my situation well enough. I'd love to be told RTFM, if only I thought this was something that stupid. =)

Remember that I didn't say that this was a problem sending mail TO root, but a problem with sending mail FROM root on the command line when using mailutil's mail binary.

Think of a cron job running as root and sending mail to any valid recipient. Cron jobs running as root can't send mail. Cron jobs running as any other users send mail just fine.

NEW INFO:

Doing this as root works;

echo "To: root" | /usr/sbin/sendmail"

So, this does seem to isolate the problem as communication between GNU mailutil's mail and Courier's sendmail substitute. Though, I'm not sure who is at fault.

If it wasn't for some of the bofh features such as what you mentioned below, I don't think I would suspect Courier as being the culprit here.

I would think that someone somewhere would wonder where their root cron job mail was going after not getting it. I sure am.

Alessandro Vesely wrote: