The Sendmail external connection problem solved
 

It seems like the default sendmail behaviour has been changed to only accept connections from localhost. This means that mail sent from other machines will bounce, and if you dig deep enough in the mail logs the reason given is "connection refused". (Rant: This is rather idiotic, if I install sendmail on my box it means that I really want to be able to receive mail from the world! Since inetd has been replaced by xinetd, and there are some firewalls turned on, it took me forever to figure out that a changed sendmail.mc was the reason.)

Fix: In /etc/mail/sendmail.mc, change the line

DAEMON_OPTIONS(`Port=smtp,Addr=127.0.0.1, Name=MTA')

to

dnl DAEMON_OPTIONS(`Port=smtp,Addr=127.0.0.1, Name=MTA')

and run

m4 /etc/mail/sendmail.mc > /etc/sendmail.cf

Then run /etc/rc.d/init.d/sendmail restart.

It worked like a charm.


(Provided by Par Kurlberg)

This can also be enabled by setting an option in the /etc/sysconfig/sendmail file

Daemon=yes

(Note* this is for a RH 7.2 system)

I just wanna post a reply to say that I used this information to bring my mail server back on line. Thanks for the great notes guys!