Your questions are about a variety of e-mail problems. I want here to limit
myself to your sendmail problems, though.
First, a basic question: what distribution and verision of Linux are you
using, and what version of sendmail?
Second, another basic question: what message or result occurs when you TRY
to send mail? How do you know that it isn't being sent? (I'm not questioning
the accuracy of your report, but the actual, EXACT error or report you are
getting can help with diagnosis.)
Third, what customizing did you do to sendmail? Out of the box, it will try
to make a direct connection to the destination host for a message (actually,
to the mail relay specified in the host's MX record), not relay through your
ISP or any other relay. You can set up sendmail.cf to force sendmail to use
an SMTP relay, but if you didn't, sendmail isn't doing so on its own. Your
pop3 setup will not change this.
(Side note to Michael: what are those "3 or so lines" you change in
sendmail.cf? Since sendmail moved to the new M4 approach, I haven't had the
occasion to modify a sendmail.cf file. I remember it as easy in the old
says, but I'm out of date here.)
Fourth, are you running sendmail in daemon mode? (If you do a "ps -ax" do
you see an entry something like "sendmail: accepting connections on port
25"?) You DON'T need this running to send mail out as such, but you do need
it to check the queue of unsent messages periodically (typically every 15 or
30 minutes).
Fifth, what does the queue of unsent messages look like? To find out, run
"mailq". Are your unsent messages sitting in the queue or have they vanished.
Sixth, and related to number 3 above, is it possible that your ISP will not
pass port-25 connections through to their destinations? This is a wild guess
-- I've never encountered such a block before -- but I suppose it is
possible. Are there any connection reports (success or failure) from
sendmail in your logs (/var/log/messages, /var/log/debug, or wherever you
have syslogd logging the relevant messages)?
About your question on SMTP and passwords -- SMTP isn't password based. SMTP
relays (up-to-date ones, anyway) decide whether to relay a message based on
relay rules, which usually involve checking that either the origin or the
destination for the message is within the domain served by the host. You
supply a password only for the pop3 host (under Linux, through fetchmail).
If you really want to "learn" sendmail, you should get the O'Reilly "bat"
book on sendmail.
As to which SMTP server you use, choosing "localhost" tells the app
(Netscape in your case, if I follow your posting) to use sendmail on the
same host as your MTA (Mail Transport Agent).
Overall, your sendmail problem can be coming from any number of sources,
including some I haven't detailed here, like DNS problems. Covering every
possibility would require a book, and an e-mail message. So if these ideas
don't get you somewhere, I suggest you post a mch more detailed description
of what you have tried and how it is failing.
Good luck. Hope some of this helps.
At 11:57 PM 5/17/99 -0700, JF wrote [in part]:
>
>sendmail is driving me round the BEND!! I can't send mail!
>
>I've been agonizing over sendmail -- about 5 sources of documentation
>for 2 of the last 3 days. And I see why one writer called it the "black
>art" of unix!! DAMN!! I can't get anywhere with this!! I can't get any
>mail to send with pine or anything else. (I CAN use netscape no problem
>-- but I need to set up these char mode mailers for my office and will
>probably switch to it myself.)
>
>I'm not even sure that sendmail is my basic problem! :-X But it
>certainly is something I want to learn.
>One complication I may be entering into it --??-- is that I'm not using
>my isp's smtp server --- (contrary to your advice above) this seems to
>be where I'm confused -- anyway I'm using another mail service on the
>particular setup I'm working on. It works in netscape messenger and
>other e-mailers I've used in NT --- dialing into one isp but using the
>pop and smtp servers of a different isp where I have an account. I must
>be missing something really basic here as indicated by your advice to
>use localhost as the smtp server.
>
>And in sendmail I see no place where I would supply a password for the
>smtp host. I don't need one?
------------------------------------"Never tell me the odds!"---
Ray Olszewski -- Han Solo
762 Garland Drive
Palo Alto, CA 94303-3603
650.328.4219 voice [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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