[lug] sendmail hell

[John Karns]

I have some questions about the behemoth known as sendmail.  Any comments
will *greatly* appreciated!

What compelled me to write this msg is my current problem in sending mail
to yahoo recipients.  Sendmail just sits there indefinitely, hanging the
queue until I abort the send, and move the yahoo msgs from
/var/spool/mqueue out of the way into another dir so that I can get the
rest of my mail out.  Checking the mail and system logs doesn't give me
any clue as to what the problem is, although I suspect that it may be
related to identd.  I've dealt with the problem by relaying my mail to the
ISP here which was working fine for some time, but as of the past week or
so, they seem to be dumping it to /dev/null - and I receive no
notification from sendmail that it's being rejected, so I'm back to the
direct connection approach.

Since my 'net connection is strictly dialup, I don't currently have a
firewall set up, and will probably avoid more complication until I get
these kinds of issues solved.  In case it's relevant, my hosts.deny is ALL
:  ALL, and hosts.allow looks like:

ALL : localhost
ALL : 192.168.1.

I added the localhost entry in response to the problem of not being able
to receive *any* mail.  From my mail log:

Jun 10 20:56:14 jkInsp8000 sendmail[1210]: f5B1uCj01210:
from=<wsp361cSf at china.c

Jun 10 20:56:15 jkInsp8000 sendmail[1211]:
f5B1uCj01210: to=<jkarns at localhost>,

which indicates that sendmail is sending to my_user_id at localhost, so
adding that line to hosts.allow "fixed" that.

Efforts to convert to postfix have not been successful, and qmail is not
an option as it requires DNS and I don't feel a need to run it as yet.

Suggestions (please!) anyone?

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John Karns                                        jkarns at csd.net