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Postfix/Sendmail: Frequent emails from smmsp to root

Submitted by Druss on Fri, 2012-07-06 03:31

I just finished setting up postfix on a Debian 6 machine. All is peachy. However, when I checked my mail logs to see how things were going I noticed a number of entries for messages being sent from smmsp@example.com to root. Checking root's mail led to messages with the following content:
/usr/share/sendmail/sendmail: line 880: /usr/sbin/sendmail-msp: No such file or directory

After some digging around, I found out that smmsp is an acronym for Sendmail Message Submission Program which is curious as I had removed sendmail during postfix's installation.

Or so I thought.

Using a dpkg -l | grep send, I found that sendmail was still well and truly installed and was trying to send test e-mails to root using smmsp via a cron job. I proceeded to remove these vestigial packages using:
aptitude remove sendmail-bin sendmail-cf sendmail-doc

... and all was well. So far.

In eidetic hindsight, I also remember that upon installing and configuring postfix, it was unable to bind to the interface correctly. I'm guessing that this was because sendmail was still holding on in the vain hope that I would retain it. No thanks. Die vile demon! Die!

Hope this helps.

Comments

Well, that fixed my problem for my VPS as Sendmail is installed by default and I thought doing apt-get purge sendmail will remove it but it did not remove all the sendmail packages, which is unfortunate.

Thank you for your help. It took me a while to do a search in Google.

You're welcome :) If the keywords that you were searching for did not point to this page, please consider adding a link on your site using those keywords and point it to this page. This should help others in the same jam.

Same thing went on in Debian 8. When I installed Postfix Debian *said* it was removing Sendmail but apparently didn't. And indeed, the port binding failed. That should have tipped me off. Thanks for the background information!