can't get sendmail to send

[glj]

I've been trying to set up sendmail so I can do my own smtp. But I must be missing something. (I'm pretty new at this.) I have edited sendmail.cf to invoke the "don't blame sendmail" option and to replace "foo.com" with mydomain.com. In /etc/hostconfig I have HOSTNAME=mydomain.com and have made Mailserver=-YES-. I have also edited /etc/hosts adding "192.168.1.101 localhost.localdomain mydomain.com." (I first tried adding "localhost.localdomain" to the 127.0.0.1 line but that didn't get rid of the familiar "unable to qualify my own domain name" messages.)

Finally I tested the setup by using the Unix mail program to send a message to an Internet address from the Terminal command line. It never left the computer. It is now sitting there in mbox marked "Diagnostic-Code: SMTP; 501 5.1.8 Sender domain must exist."

Any help would be most appreciated.

George Johnson

[glj]

By the way, I just realized that I can send messages to my throwaway Yahoo account. They go through just fine. But sending to a more legitimate address causes the message to bounce back with the "Sender domain must exist" error. So I guess the question is why these other domains are not recognizing mine as legitimate.

[bluehz]

I doubt this is your problem - but it is a sendmail problem that causes a lot of people grief. There is a bug in sendmail/system that won't allow sendmail to work if the root directory of your HD is group writeable. The solution is to turn of the group writeable bit for "/" (aka root).

[glj]

Thanks very much. I did run into that earlier, but the "don't blame sendmail" option seems to have solved that particular problem. I think this must have something to do with the IP number of my sending machine not matching the IP number of my domain's DNS (an apparent disadvantage of using a remote hosting service). Does anyone know if that makes sense?

[bluehz]

Have you thought about using Postfix instead of Sendmail. I use POstfix after reading a lot about Sendmail being hard to configure and having some security issues. The installation is fairly easy and it works great send mail out to my ISP without any arguments. I still have sendmail activated though for PHP / perl scripts as I have yet been able to figure out how to get script to properly use Postfix. I know it can be done as many have - I just haven't gotten it to work yet. Other than that Postfix works great! Let me know if you are interested and I can dig up some info I used on installing/activating Postfix.

Also - do you use Webmin? Great GUI interface for lots of X processes. including sendmail and postfix. Get it here (free): http://www.webmin.com

[glj]

Thanks a lot. I didn't know about Webmin, and I'd only barely heard of Postfix. I'll check them out.

George