Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!mailrus!purdue!decwrl!ucbvax!MAILGW.CC.UMICH.EDU!rees From: rees@MAILGW.CC.UMICH.EDU (Jim Rees) Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo Subject: Re: sendmail problem Message-ID: <8808171538.AA04169@mailgw.cc.umich.edu> Date: 17 Aug 88 15:39:23 GMT Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Reply-To: rees@caen.engin.umich.edu (Jim Rees) Organization: The Internet Lines: 19 Every so often, maybe a couple times a week, sendmail will not be able to deliver a message. If it is able to return an error message, it will say "554 \dennis... unknown mailer error 1" with the accompanying message mail: cannot append to /usr/spool/mail/dennis mail: can't send to dennis or maybe just "554 \dennis... unknown mailer error 2". On some of these occasions, the error seemed to occur at about the time a user was getting out of mail, or using the command "file %" to update the mail file. At other times, this wasn't the case. Just a guess, but if your local user agent (ucb mail) has /usr/spool/mail/dennis locked for reading, then a delivery agent (/bin/mail) on another node tries to open the spool file for writing, it won't be able to acquire a write lock and it may give up. What it should do is retry in a few seconds, but I don't know if the domain/ix /bin/mail does this or not. -------