[SOLVED] Why is smtp sending messages?

[TastyHuman]

I'm running Kubuntu in a VMWare session.

Something in the system is continuously attempting to sent messages via smtp, and message delivery always fails, resulting in a continuous stream of error messages in KSystemLog. The messages look like this:

2009-08-04 06:22:03 ken-kubuntu nullmailer[7698] smtp: failed: Connect failed
2009-08-04 06:22:03 ken-kubuntu nullmailer[5373] Sending failed: Connection failed
2009-08-04 06:22:03 ken-kubuntu nullmailer[5373] Starting delivery: protocol: smtp host: mail.spiritone.com file: 1248014806.15406

These three messages are repeated over and over with only the time and name of the file changing.

The thing is I don't want or need to send email from this vmware session and any log messages I care about are lost in the sea of noise.

So my questions are what is sending these messages and how do I turn them off?

TIA

[lmilano]

Re: Why is smtp sending messages?

Weird, do you have a mail account with them? (spiritone.com)

[ukchucktown]

Re: Why is smtp sending messages?

That is kind of weird. One thing I noticed in your log was nullmailer. There actually is a package in the repository named nullmailer. It's a mail relay. I don't know why it would be installed. It's not installed by default. Try "sudo apt-get purge nullmailer" and see what happens.

[TastyHuman]

Re: Why is smtp sending messages?

Thunderbird was initially installed just to see how it worked. I sent one test message, which was delivered, and haven't used it since and probably should delete it.

The nullmailer purge suggestion did the trick.

Still not sure what it was trying to send though.

Thanks for the speedy help!

[TastyHuman]

Re: Why is smtp sending messages?

For future reference I discovered the source for the messages it was trying to send.

At one point Zoneminder was downloaded and installed. I fiddled with it briefly and then uninstalled it.

During that time it created some messages in the nullmailer queue directory which never got sent due to failures and it was continually retrying. When nullmailer was purged it complained that the nullmailer queue directory could not be deleted since it wasn't empty and, sure enough, these messages were still there.

[Snowhog]

Re: Why is smtp sending messages?

So you resolved your issue? If 'yes,' please return to your initial post and click the modify button and add SOLVED to the subject.

[TastyHuman]

Re: [SOLVED] Why is smtp sending messages?

OK, done. Thanks.

[flarson]

Re: [SOLVED] Why is smtp sending messages?

In case anyone is interested situations like this are one good reason to use aptitude rather than apt-get. Had you used aptitude to remove zoneminder it would have removed nullmailer also.

[kubicle]

Re: [SOLVED] Why is smtp sending messages?

In case anyone is interested situations like this are one good reason to use aptitude rather than apt-get. Had you used aptitude to remove zoneminder it would have removed nullmailer also.

'sudo apt-get autoremove zoneminder' will do that as well (remove automatically installed dependencies with the package)...synaptic can do that, too (if package is installed with apt-get/synaptic).

[lmilano]

Re: [SOLVED] Why is smtp sending messages?

I guess it would be nice for all of these to give you a popup (or warning if text based) suggesting how to remove the no-longer needed dependencies, and asking whether you want to do it at that time. Oh well, these things need to be proposed in the proper channels ...