[lug] sendmail from cable/dhcp

[Bill Jorgensen]

On Tue, 25 Mar 2003, Neal McBurnett wrote:

> For years I've had no trouble with a standard redhat configuration,
> sending email via mutt and a local sendmail on my machine, directly to
> the recipients.  The ISP is attbi, but I don't use their smtp server.
> 
> I.e. I'm on a dhcp connection.  But that connection hardly every
> changes IP address because the machine is up all the time.

A question or two...

1.) Before the issue were your email sent as neal at attbi.com? If it was
not could you look at your mail header to see how sendmail is handling
your mail?

2.) I read Bear's response and it is important to know how attbi.com sees
your box within their name space because that will dictate your MX records
for email. Would you be able to get that information? For instance, I have
a PC workstation at work that accesses the company network via DHCP. However,
the NAME of my workstation stays the same within the name space regardless
of IP address.

> Then I rebooted a few days ago, and now mail to certain places
> (like colorado.edu) is not working.  I get bounces with this message
> 
>  451 4.1.8 Domain of sender address neal at 12-253-85-111.client.attbi.com does not resolve
>  Warning: message still undelivered after 4 hours
>  Will keep trying until message is 5 days old

I would investigate to see if attbi.com will define your hostname within
their name space so that you do not care about what IP you have. The name of
your box stays the same and you let attbi.com deal with the change of IP
because of a reboot of your box. This may cost you though.

>  1) Any insight on fixing this particular problem?  I'd like to send
>  email directly because then I can look at the logs to see exactly
>  when the mail was delivered to the recipient's machine, and I can
>  turn on opportunistic encryption via SSL, and other useful features.

It has been a while since I have had the opportunity to trouble shoot
email issues. Good luck. http://www.sendmail.org can be a wealth of
information. You can post questions there too if you would like.

Later,

Bill

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  UNIX... spoken with hushed and reverent tones.
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