[lug] sendmail hell

[John Hernandez]

John, the fact that your ISP sends your outgoing e-mails to the bit bucket is very odd.  Rather than resorting to sending directly from your dial-up box (and all the associated headaches of maintaining a mail queue), I would hassle your ISP until they provide you with a working relay.

Back to your original question, have you tried to troubleshoot using 'sendmail -v recipient at yahoo.com'?  Type some text and hit Ctrl-D to send and get verbose output.  That may reveal what's holding up the transaction.

-John

John Karns wrote:
> 
> 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?
> 
> ----------------------------------------------------------------
> John Karns                                        jkarns at csd.net
> 
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