Mail sending fails

["Jørn Helge B. Dahl" <jornhd@deich.folkebibl.no>]

Hi all.

Since this morning I've had some trouble sending mail w/gnus.  I sit on a
RedHat 8.0 machine, I use the latest Oort of this morning and emacs 21.2.1 of
standard RedHat.  The only obvious thing different from the last time it
worked is an installation of w3m-el, which I later removed.  Other than that,
I have not been fiddling with .gnus for a while.  On the other hand I haven't
restartet emacs and gnus for a couple of days either, so who knows :-)

The relevant section of my .gnus:

(setq smtpmail-smtp-server "carl.deich.folkebibl.no")
(setq message-send-mail-function 'smtpmail-send-it)

Is there anything else I need to do?  Looking at the docs it seems that this
should be enough.

And, I threw in this to see if I could get something useful out of it:

(setq smtpmail-debug-info t)

but there's no SMTP debug buffer there at all, before it fails.

What is also strange, is that if I try to customize smtpmail after I load
gnus, the group is empty.

Debugger trace (sorry for the long lines):

Debugger entered--Lisp error: (wrong-type-argument stringp nil)
  open-network-stream("SMTP" #<buffer *trace of SMTP session to nil*> nil "smtp")
  apply(open-network-stream ("SMTP" #<buffer *trace of SMTP session to nil*> nil "smtp"))
  binary-funcall(open-network-stream "SMTP" #<buffer *trace of SMTP session to nil*> nil "smtp")
  smtp-open-connection(#<buffer *trace of SMTP session to nil*> nil "smtp")
  smtp-send-buffer("jornhd@torfeus.deich.folkebibl.no" ("jornhd@deich.folkebibl.no") #<buffer  smtpmail temp>)
  smtpmail-send-it()
  message-smtpmail-send-it()
  gnus-agent-send-mail()
  message-send-mail(nil)
  message-send-via-mail(nil)
  message-send(nil)
  message-send-and-exit()
  gnus-draft-send(29 "nndraft:drafts" t)
  gnus-draft-send-message(nil)
  call-interactively(gnus-draft-send-message)


Looking at the trace it seems that there is no server that smtpmail can send
to, and that that is the error, but I'm nothing of a hacker here, so that is
just a guess.

Doing a M-: smtpmail-smtp-server when in the buffer of the failed mail returns
"carl.deich.folkebibl.no", though.

Thanks,
-- 
Jørn Helge B. Dahl