[lug] Weird mail/firewall problem

[Chip Atkinson]

Greetings,

I'm having some weird stuff going on with my mail and perhaps the
firewall and am wondering if anyone could shed some light on the problem
I'd appreciate it.

In my maillog, I'm seeing entries like this:

Feb 12 19:06:14 poodle sendmail[22496]: SAA22496: timeout waiting for
input from femail17.sdc1.sfba.home.com during message collect

In my messages file I'm seeing entries like this:

Feb 12 19:05:28 poodle kernel: Packet log: input DENY ppp0 PROTO=6
24.254.60.38:65535 63.173.117.115:65535 L=492 S=0x00 I=7422 F=0x2042 T=245
(#12)

Then I nslookup  24.254.60.38

Server:  ns1.rmpg.org
Address:  63.225.119.189

Name:    femail44.sdc1.sfba.home.com
Address:  24.254.60.38

Huh?  It seems that the email timeouts are related to these denied
packets.  The weird thing is that the port is 65535, not 25.

I see these denial messages scrolling by almost as fast as the messages in
the maillog.

I'm a bit puzzled and don't want to open up myself unnecessarily, but it
slmost seems that I'm blocking mail throughput.

Thanks in advance.

Chip