Jonathan, Thanks for your response. I checked my exim.conf again and did not find anything wrong in it. I have included a few of the values below.
Assume: my true IP address: 192.1.1.1 my true machine name: badhost.corp.com /etc/exim.conf === qualify_domain = badhost.corp.com local_domains = local_domains_include_host = true local_domains_include_host_literals = true #relay_domains = #relay_domains_include_local_mx = true You commented that you were running exim 3, so I downloaded the source, compiled and installed it. That did not resolve my problem. Below is a sample session that shows my problem. For this session, I was on xxx.dialup.erols.com telnetting into badhost.corp.com and attempting to relay mail to remote.com. If you attempt to duplicate these results be sure to replace 192.1.1.1 with the actual IP address of the machine you are attempting to relay through. telnet badhost.corp.com 25 Trying... Connected to badhost.corp.com. Escape character is '^]'. 220 badhost.corp.com ESMTP Exim 3.12 #1 Thu, 09 Mar 2000 14:45:18 -0500 MAIL FROM:<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 250 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> is syntactically correct RCPT TO:<"[EMAIL PROTECTED]"@[192.1.1.1]> 250 <"[EMAIL PROTECTED]"@[192.1.1.1]> is syntactically correct I expect the following result here instead of 250: 550 relaying to <"[EMAIL PROTECTED]"@[192.1.1.1]> prohibited by administrator If this test is run to localhost (telnet localhost 25, 192.1.1.1->127.0.0.1) I do get the results that I expect - 550 relaying prohibited. As I mentioned in my first message, even if you complete this SMTP session with DATA, exim will not relay the message. Exim will accept and queue the message 250 OK id=12RaPH-0003Zq-00 Then will discover [EMAIL PROTECTED] is not a valid local user. It will then send an error message to "spamtest" which is not valid either. It will then freeze the error message. My concern is that exim does not return a 5xx error status at any point in the session. John
