Tony Gravagno
Start here:
http://www.pickwiki.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?SendAnEmail
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I have to apologize for an old and unmaintained web page, but NebulaMail works fine on AIX.
http://Nebula-RnD.com/products/mail.htm
If you want to take a look at NebulaMail, I'll update the web page. :) The product now has more features and the API has been improved considerably. Why use NebulaMail? Any BASIC programmer can use it. Your BASIC code can be ported to any DBMS and any OS with no changes, and that can't be said for most other solutions.
The only issue with common freeware solutions is that they're usually centered on Linux or Windows and not AIX - and very few FOSS developers target AIX. NebulaMail v3 is based on PHP while its v2 precessor was based on Perl. Getting Perl or PHP to work on AIX can be very difficult though it can also be a slam dunk "why were we expecting a problem?" effort as well. If you can get PHP working on AIX then NebulaMail will work there too.
Having said all that, a report that mail from AIX is not arriving to its destination can be quite disturbing for AIX users. You're paying a lot of money for OS support and I suggest you put in a call to IBM to cash in on that investment. It's less likely that 'mail' is failing, and more likely that recipient POP3 servers are rejecting mail from "localhost.localdomain" as an anonymous sending server. That has the signature of spam written all over it. You should also have a ReplyTo or Abuse header in your outbound mails. Some servers will reject mail if there is no place to report issues. Legitimate mail comes through real SMTP servers, often using SPF and registered with block-list sites to validate their authenticity. (NebulaMail moves mail through SMTP servers like this, it's not a replacement Mail Server Agent, and it allows you to add ReplyTo and other headers.)
HTH
Tony Gravagno
Nebula Research and Development
TG@ remove.pleaseNebula-RnD.com
Nebula R&D sells mv.NET and other Pick/MultiValue products
worldwide, and provides related development services
remove.pleaseNebula-RnD.com/blog
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On Thursday, June 7, 2012 1:21:33 PM UTC-7, Scott Johnston wrote:
My coworker has had some problems with his emails going POOF! He's created an alternate "MONITOR" file to capture what emails get pushed through UniVerse to UNIX/AIX but he still has a problem with his emails not arriving. I seem to remember a while ago someone suggested and alternative to the "mail" on AIX. Does anyone have another product to suggest?
Tony Gravagno
I should also note another recent e-mail option which I don't think I've ever seen mentioned in these forums…
SendGrid.com is a mail service which provides an API for emails, compared to linking directly with some MTA or MUA. You send your data to them and they send it out. They provide SPF, DKIM to help your mail to get where it's going, as well as an API and website for gathering statistics on delays, bounces, returns, and other fates to which any email may succumb.
I've never used SendGrid but they've grown quite rapidly in popularity over the last year, so I think they're worthy of inquiry. I was reminded of this service by a virtual cloud provider that I use where they offer 40,000 free emails per month to active customers. Hey, if you're hosting your MV environment in the cloud, that's not such a bad deal, and these days for many companies the cloud is becoming as viable an option as onsite servers.
HTH
T
Scott Johnston
fwinans
even ones going to an email recipient on the same domain as the sending email account? That is,
if your aix sendmail {or whatever subsystem handles email departing the server under AIX, which I
don't currently use, sorry} is handing the outbound emails to an smtp server smtp.foo.com using
login account aixp...@foo.com there, do you even lose emails sent _to_ someot...@foo.com ? Come to think of it, does even email to aixp...@foo.com get lost?
There's a reason that might happen -- I've got a very, very, reputable email provider that I've used
for like fifteen years and even they got 'blacklisted' for a brief time last year -- they warned all their
customers that until they got the blacklisting lifted they were liable to be unable to send email to
most other email domains. Or hey, your email might not be reaching the smtp server for various
reasons, even though it formerly did.
As far as trying NebulaMail, I'm sure it is a fine product, but did you even think of downloading and
compiling the email {"Encrypted Mail"} product, which is, hey, Free? Like trying NebulaMail,
you can experiment with email without at all molesting the mostly/nearly working email that you've
had set up and formerly/soon_again working on your AIX server. It provides a new command
'email' that does not interact at all with the existing programs or email queue(s) of AIX. I admit I
have not tested it under AIX, but it was a no-brainer when I unbzipped the tarball and did install
using the readme instructions on our rhel5.4 server.
http://www.cleancode.org/downloads/email/
Something else to try is, find out what settings the AIX box has been using to contact an off-campus
smtp server and clone those into a Windows Outlook Express {or, if you bought Microsoft Office,
clone it into a Windows Outlook} email account and hand-launch a few test messages to see if
it is just AIX that needs tweaking, or is a more general problem with the smtp account involved.
Also, if your preferred email-submittal program supports this feature, suggest you adopt a corporate
policy of adding a fixed specific blind carbon copy {bcc:} email destination to all messages so you'll
have a copy in that email inbox when, not if, a client pops up later claiming 'hey!, you never sent me
that info/invoice!' And adjust your winbox or whatever you collect that email account on so it leaves
a copy on the server for a week-- and then _also_ set up a winbox at home or somewhere offsite
that you use to download it a second time. Then if your main logging winbox croaks you've got a
2nd copy of that master inbox on the home winbox.
Tony Gravagno
Just to clarify, when I suggest NebulaMail (or is that NubuMail now?), it's not to overcome issues that seem to be coming from the SMTP server, and that does seem to be the source of this AIX issue from what I'm reading.
I created and recommend NebulaMail for sites that want e-mail without learning about how email servers work or the SMTP/POP3 protocol. If you've ever sent multiple attachments with different MIME types, or embedded images in HTML, then you probably know what I mean. And I created it for people who like to do everything in BASIC. It seems whenever someone suggests using "tools" a good number of people get all fidgety and say stuff like "why isn't it built in?" or "why can't I just do it in BASIC?" Well, most of my products were designed specifically with that audience in mind. If you prefer to dabble with other tools, go for it. I encourage it. I sell convenience tools for a low cost because it saves people time. You can decide for yourself how much your time is worth. If you spend more than 2 hours trying to figure out some other tool then you've already paid more than you would with a convenience tool. That's how I see it anyway.
But aside from that, let's try to resolve the issue at hand…
With regard to "I've never heard of any UNIX/MV email issues once they were up and running":
In my experience, when e-mail suddenly fails to go out it can be for several reasons (a couple of these were touched on by Frank):
- hostname or IP address of SMTP server changed
- DNS used for outbound hostname resolution changed
- SMTP server changed port from 25 to 2525 or similar
- automatic password timeout as of specific date, requires change
- sending account banned, deleted, suspended
- sending server being blocked by one or more third-party RBL
- file permissions changed due to an OS or component update
- firewall settings or other router change
- /tmp or other mounted file system on a full disk volume
In other words, a Lot of things can interfere with an existing environment.
HTH
T
Dick Thiot
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