Thanks for all the advice received so far which I will work through and use to try and fix the email. I’ll try not to post much more that reveals my ignorance and tests people’s patience!
> On 6 Jun 2026, at 16:13, G.W. Haywood <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hello again George, > >> On Fri, 5 Jun 2026, [email protected] wrote: >> >> I've potentially made some progress. > > :) > >> ... sendmail had never been installed so that has been done now. > > In your OP you'd said that you installed msmtp as an MTA in preference > to Sendmail because of its simpler configuration. But never mind that > now, you seem to have moved things on quite a way. :) > >> It's running as a service fine but reporting various errors about >> unqualified host names. I don't suppose this is really surprising >> because I haven't configured sendmail. > > Sendmail needs to know who it's working for - its domain. Usually you > would configure it to route mail for just one domain. Large providers > will handle mail for millions of domains. Sendmail can be picky about > the domains it will do work for, I'll mention that later. > >> Running the test message command under su backuppc now completes without >> flagging any errors. Unfortunately, though, the email doesn't get sent >> and the mail is returned reporting authentication failures. e.g. >> >> ----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors ----- >> <|[email protected]|> >> (reason: 550 Authentication is required for relay) >> >> ----- Transcript of session follows ----- >> ... while talking to mail5.hostinguk.net.: >>>>> AUTH dialogue >> <<< 535 Authentication failed >>>>> MAIL From:<|[email protected]|> SIZE=527 >> <<< 550 Authentication is required for relay >> 554 5.0.0 Service unavailable >> >> Again, this may be because I haven't configured sendmail. But I have >> configured msmtp and it works correctly from my normal user account. > > This doesn't look to me like a Sendmail configuration problem. This is > what for example Sendmail does when it's being picky. [*] It's what I > would expect to see if for example you were a criminal, trying to send > spam through somebody else's mail server. It doesn't matter whether or > not the mail server is running Sendmail. Any (sane) MTA will refuse to > do what you seem to have asked it to do there. > > Is hostinguk.net your email service provider? If so then presumably > when you send your own mail through their service you have to give to > the service provider some "AUTH" information before they will let you > send the mail. That information will only be valid for the address or > addresses for which they have agreed to send mail. The '550' response > (refusal) that you received from your provider I think means that you > have tried to do something that hasn't been agreed with them. > > Do you really want to send mail from the BackupPC server through your > email provider? If you do, I guess it might be OK *if* the recipient > address is in the same domain as your sending address. Personally I'd > keep this sort of mail entirely inside the local network if possible. > > [*] Normally Sendmail will refuse to 'relay' mail. That means accept > mail to a non-local domain from a non-local domain and simply send it > on. Unless you really know what you're doing it is a VERY BAD IDEA to > relay mail on a server exposed to the Internet, because then criminals > will (soon) find the 'open proxy' server and use it for their criminal > purposes. Later on, your service provider would probably explain that > its reserves of patience are limited. > > -- > > 73, > Ged. > > > _______________________________________________ > BackupPC-users mailing list > [email protected] > List: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users > Wiki: https://github.com/backuppc/backuppc/wiki > Project: https://backuppc.github.io/backuppc/ _______________________________________________ BackupPC-users mailing list [email protected] List: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki: https://github.com/backuppc/backuppc/wiki Project: https://backuppc.github.io/backuppc/
