SUMMARY AND SOLUTION:

A bug in the current version of the sendmail program on SUN Athena
workstations may, on rare occasions, cause mail messages to be held by the
workstation rather than sent on to the MIT mail server.  While this
happens only rarely, the potential impact of the problem is high.  Mail
may, under these circumstances, be delayed for days, even weeks.  This is
only a problem on SUN workstations.  Until a fix to the problem is
installed, the following commands may help:

If you suspect that mail is queued on your workstation, type:

	athena% mailq

It will list any messages waiting to be sent.  If any of them have
been waiting for longer than a few minutes, this may indicate a
problem.  The easiest thing to do at this point is to reboot the
machine, which will also reset the mail queue and cause waiting
messages to be sent.

Type:

	athena% tellme root

to find out the root password.  Then, log out and log back in using
the username "root" and the root password.  Finally, type:

	athena# reboot

to reboot the machine.  Your mail should be sent shortly afterwards.

DETAILS: 

There currently exists a bug in the sendmail program for SUN Solaris.
Occasionally, the sendmail program will try to deliver mail to the MIT
mail server and fail.  This is normal behavior if the mail server is
busy, and sendmail will try to re-send the mail after a short
interval.  However, there is a problem with the SUN Solaris version of
sendmail which may cause it to exit unexpectedly without releasing
these queued messages.  When sendmail restarts, these old messages
will appear to be locked by another sendmail program, and so will not
be automatically sent.

While this only happens rarely, if it does happen mail may sit on the
local workstation until the machine is next rebooted, which can be
several days or more.  This is a serious problem.  The next Athena
patch release, scheduled for Spring Break, will implement a temporary
fix which will prevent mail from getting stuck for more than 24 hours.
Athena is aware of the potential impact of this problem and is working
feverishly to have the bug completely fixed in the Athena 8.1 release,
due this summer.