I'm trying to set up an email server on my Fedora 8 box, but I've run into some trouble. I can send mail to any account that is local to the machine, but if I try to send an email to the outside world, I get errors like the ones below in my mail log. It says "stat=Service unavailable" when trying to send to a GMail account. I get similar results when trying to send to a yahoo account. Please note that I suppressed the server name and email addresses for confidentiality.


May 8 23:49:52 servername sendmail[5135]: m494nm7R005133: to=<outside email address>, ctladdr=<return address> (500/500), delay=00:00:04, xdelay=00:00:04, mailer=esmtp, pri=120767, relay=gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com. [209.85.201.114], dsn=5.0.0, stat=Service unavailable
May 8 23:49:52 servername sendmail[5135]: m494nm7R005133: m494nq7R005135: DSN: Service unavailable

I know that this can be fixed somehow, but I'm a email server newbie. Can someone please help me? Thanks in advance.

In the "Postmaster" mailbox, you have a DSN message.
It contains clues.

I don't use sendmail, but this looks a bit like you are trying to relay through gmail servers and relaying is being denied. Does that sound possible given your setup?

Are you attempting to send mail from a home DSL or Dynamic Ip address?

if so forget it they will block you !

Thanks for the reply aot2002. My router has a dynamic IP address, so I'm most likely being blocked.

All,

If my ISP had a valid mail relay that my computer could send mail to, how would I configure sendmail to use this? I tried google searching, but sendmail configuration looks so cryptic and I can't seem to find a nice step by step tutorial.

Thanks in advance for your help.

try to install postfix instead its much easier when using a relay.

Thanks for the reply, but I figured out how to do it with sendmail. After my previous post, I continued to google search and I finally found what I was looking for. It turned out to be one line in my sendmail.mc file.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

dnl # Uncomment and edit the following line if your outgoing mail needs to
dnl # be sent out through an external mail server:
dnl #
define(`SMART_HOST', `external.mail.server.here')dnl

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Thank you all for your help.

im so proud of you !