[armatura]

I have been racking my brain for the past few days trying to get the email notification for a voicemail to work correctly. I realized I had to configure sendmail to work correctly, but that in of itself is very puzzling to me.

I'm a relative newbie to asterisk but can certainly make my way around well enough by this point -- I was curious if anyone had some very simple instructions for configuring sendmail correctly (sendmail.org's instructions not really help, theres about 10,000 steps and I dont understand what half of them refer to, they assume too much for a newb like myself).

Or, alternatively, is there an option to use pine or some simpler program? I have pine configured correctly but dont know what command I should use in the voicemail.conf file as the overriding mail handler "mailcmd=?" that one.

Thanks for any help,

Arm

[MustardMan]

I vaguely recall experiencing the same frustration as you. I eventually figured it out but for the life of me I can't remember the details. I don't think you need sendmail but I could be wrong

Here is what I recall checking/configuring
*Make sure the smtp server daemon (service) is running
*I believe you need to configure your HOST(S?) file to some domain name of your choosing other than the default "localhost". I think this is where my problem was or something related to the HOST(S?) file.

It is very simple how it works but you are correct in that it is hard to find instructions on how to change most Linux default configurations to get it working. Search for how to use the SMTP server that comes with your flavor of Linux. That is what you need to have working as I recall. Not sendmail.

Sorry I can't give you more details.

[craig]

I'm relatively new to asterisk but have been around the block a few times with Linux and the BSDs. There are a number of issues that could be affecting your setup. I personally dislike sendmail (it's configuration is rather compex) and changed it out for postfix. There are a number of how-tos for most OSs. Pine won't help you, since it's a mail client and not a mail server.

I would try to see if you can send mail to yourself first. Just open pine and send your own account an e-mail. If it doesn't work, check the logs to see what went wrong. Then try to send an e-mail to an external account and troubleshoot the same way. If you are on broadband, you'd be surprised at the number of ISPs that won't accept mail from a dynmaic ISP address (spam and all). To fix this you'll need to put in a mail relay entry into the configuration.

So, I'd start at the beginning and see how far you can get with e-mails in general. That will help narrow down why asterisk can't send. Odds are it's a general sendmail configuration problem.

[isepic]

Originally Posted by craig

I'm relatively new to asterisk but have been around the block a few times with Linux and the BSDs. There are a number of issues that could be affecting your setup. I personally dislike sendmail (it's configuration is rather compex) and changed it out for postfix. There are a number of how-tos for most OSs. Pine won't help you, since it's a mail client and not a mail server.

I would try to see if you can send mail to yourself first. Just open pine and send your own account an e-mail. If it doesn't work, check the logs to see what went wrong. Then try to send an e-mail to an external account and troubleshoot the same way. If you are on broadband, you'd be surprised at the number of ISPs that won't accept mail from a dynmaic ISP address (spam and all). To fix this you'll need to put in a mail relay entry into the configuration.

So, I'd start at the beginning and see how far you can get with e-mails in general. That will help narrow down why asterisk can't send. Odds are it's a general sendmail configuration problem.

Craig, I think you're 100% right, I wanted to "second" the fact that A LOT of ISPs won't accept email from a dynamic IP address, and using a relay (even gmail) fixed my issues in the past.

[craig]

For the longest time I could use my home mail server to send just about anywhere. AOL, ironically enough, was the first ISP I noticed that gave me grief and it went down hill from there. Now I use my ISP's mail server as a relay and my problems have gone away!

Just to clarify my original post, when I said to mail yourself, I meant your local account on the machine (i.e., NOT an external ISP). That should just prove that mail is accepted and delivered locally.

[isepic]

check out (as I forgot myself) super relay for sendmail the one I found was specifically for sbc-yahoo... so I have a yahoo account, I just replaced where it has sbcglobal.net with my ID and it relays the email through them, of course, after authenticating first with my yahoo email address..... works like a charm. sorry i dont have the direct link.

[greyhound4334]

Another alternative is to look at using ssmtp. It's a very simple smtp client, and as such a lot easier to configure. It works fine for me, and I'd beaten my head against the wall with sendmail for too long.

Check out this thread for more: http://forums.digium.com/viewtopic.p...ighlight=ssmtp

Cheers,
john

[AlexanderBell]

This Nerd Vittles tutorial will show you another approach that usually works.

[isepic]

Hey Grehound4334 - I agree 100% sendmail sux0rs :-) I found the article I used to make mine work: http://www.urbanophile.com/arenn/hac...h-sbc-dsl.html

Hey AlexanderBell - I love your solution, but I dont want to have to change my hosts file everytime my IP changes with my ISP. So this one worked out better for me, I just relay using my sbc-yahoo account.

[dswartz]

i had a different problem - when asterisk would try to send email it would get munged up and bounce back to my internal server due to some name resolution issue (i think?) i have a static dsl IP. i tweaked the sendmail.cf to make my internal postfix server the smart host and all was well.