sendmail: host name lookup failure

GabeF · 12-03-2002, 07:32 PM

I wrote a page for my website that sends an email to a yahoo address when the form is submitted. In testing, it worked the first two or three times, but all following attempts did not reach the yahoo account. I checked mailq, and this message reoccured in all sendmail attempts:
"
Deferred: Host name: mx4.mail.yahoo.com: host name lookup failure"

I also tried sending it to the email account given me by my ISP, and that also doesn't work, although it did at first.

unSpawn · 12-04-2002, 04:53 AM

Is there a reason you choose to use that server? "dig mx yahoo.com" turns up a few MXes, so sendmail will be able to find out where to deliver mail by itself when it can resolve the address.

GabeF · 12-04-2002, 07:41 AM

Is there somewhere where I need to add the server? I don't know much about how sendmail works- it chose that server on its own.

GabeF · 12-04-2002, 08:00 AM

It appears that the mail server (smtpd) wasn't running... I started it back up and it seems to be working now. By the by, is /var/spool/mqueue supposed to only be readable and writable by root? (drwx------)?