sendmail in slackware 14.2 unable to recieve mails but able to send

Question

I'm a sys ad newbie and I'm learning slackware this not a production env, slackware comes preinstalled with sendmail and alpine, here's my problem, i've built the sendmail.cf file properly via

cd /usr/share/sendmail/cf/cf
m4 sendmail-slackware.mc > /etc/mail/sendmail.cf
/etc/rc.d/rc.sendmail restart

i've configured my /etc/hosts file

127.0.0.1 darkstar.example.net darkstar

and is able to send out emails via alpine, my problem is emails that do get relayed to my slackware, recieved mails always go to /var/mail/root (yes i am using root), instead of /var/spool/mail/root looking at logs also says that the mail was Stat=Sent with no problems

here's a sample log of me sending to myself (/var/log/maillog)

May  2 08:52:21 darkstar sm-mta[1495]: starting daemon (8.15.2): SMTP+queueing@00:25:00
May  2 08:52:22 darkstar sm-msp-queue[1499]: starting daemon (8.15.2): queueing@00:25:00
May  2 09:56:31 darkstar sm-mta[1992]: gethostbyaddr(10.0.4.12) failed: 1
May  2 09:56:31 darkstar sm-mta[1992]: gethostbyaddr(192.168.6.1) failed: 1
May  2 09:56:31 darkstar sm-mta[1993]: starting daemon (8.15.2): SMTP+queueing@00:25:00
May  2 09:56:31 darkstar sm-msp-queue[1996]: starting daemon (8.15.2): queueing@00:25:00
May  2 09:57:22 darkstar sendmail[2018]: w421vCZQ002018: from=, size=332, class=0, nrcpts=1, msgid=, proto=ESMTP, relay=root@localhost
May  2 09:57:23 darkstar sm-mta[2022]: w421vMuK002022: from=, size=516, class=0, nrcpts=1, msgid=, proto=ESMTP, daemon=MTA, relay=localhost.localdomain [127.0.0.1]
May  2 09:57:23 darkstar sendmail[2020]: w421vCZQ002018: to=, ctladdr= (0/0), delay=00:00:01, xdelay=00:00:01, mailer=relay, pri=120332, relay=[127.0.0.1] [127.0.0.1], dsn=2.0.0, stat=Sent (w421vMuK002022 Message accepted for delivery)
May  2 09:57:23 darkstar sm-mta[2023]: w421vMuK002022: to=, ctladdr= (0/0), delay=00:00:01, xdelay=00:00:00, mailer=local, pri=30730, dsn=2.0.0, stat=Sent
May  2 10:05:26 darkstar sendmail[2076]: w4225Ko8002076: from=, size=324, class=0, nrcpts=1, msgid=, proto=ESMTP, relay=root@localhost
May  2 10:05:26 darkstar sm-mta[2080]: w4225QM5002080: from=, size=504, class=0, nrcpts=1, msgid=, proto=ESMTP, daemon=MTA, relay=localhost.localdomain [127.0.0.1]

Answer 1

In general, sendmail and its configuration files are a higher form of magic. Look at the sheer size of the sendmail book from o'Reilly's.

However, on my slackware (14.2, out-of-the-box, more or less), /var/mail is a link to /var/spool/mai:

ljm@ronsard:~$ ls -l  /var/mail
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 Sep 27  2017 /var/mail -> spool/mail/