Postfix hangs when sending email

Question

If I try to send an email as follows, the process hangs and nothing happens:

>>> from django.core.management import setup_environ
>>> from cube import settings
>>> setup_environ(settings)
'cube'
>>> from django.core.mail import send_mail
>>> send_mail('Subject', 'Message', '[email protected]', ['[email protected]'], fail_silently=False)

However, doing telnet to port 25 works just fine

$ telnet localhost 25
Trying ::1...
Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to localhost.
Escape character is '^]'.
^]

telnet> 

and here's this just in case

$ netstat -a | grep :smtp
tcp        0      0 *:smtp                  *:*                     LISTEN     
tcp        0      0 localhost:smtp          localhost:44932         ESTABLISHED
tcp        0      0 localhost:44932         localhost:smtp          ESTABLISHED
tcp        0      0 localhost:smtp          localhost:60964         ESTABLISHED
tcp        0      0 localhost:60964         localhost:smtp          ESTABLISHED
tcp        0      0 localhost:37247         localhost:smtp          FIN_WAIT2  
tcp        1      0 localhost:smtp          localhost:37247         CLOSE_WAIT 
tcp        9      0 localhost:smtp          localhost:37245         CLOSE_WAIT 

I run Ubuntu 10.04 and Python 2.6.5

I don't know where to look next to figure out what's wrong. Please help me. Thank you.

Answer 1

Your mail server isn't working fine. When you connect to it using telnet, you should see a welcome message along the lines of:

220 your.server.name ESMTP Postfix

(You can check the greeting that you should be seeing by running postconf smtpd_banner.)

You don't get that, so the mail server isn't running properly. send_mail is probably hanging waiting for that initial message.

Restart Postfix, and look in the /var/log/mail.* log files; there may be a clue in there as to why it's not working.