root@darkstar.mach6p is an OK address for mail sent only on / across your private LAN, the network you own.

It is not a valid address for the internet. Your only world-reachable address is e???????4@fibertel.com.ar. The fact that that mail is being delivered to darkstar.mach6p is irrelevant. Your ISP asks your mail agent for your account / ISP login and password, and delivers the mail. It does not care what name you have assigned to your local machine.

And you should edit out your email address from any posts to LQ, or you may be deluged with spam (net bots will find it and add you to lists )

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Thanks for the warning about bots. And about the difference between privite LAN and Internet, that's another piece of the puzzle I can fit in. Maybe someday I will be able to join all pieces together. Regards.

If you make HOSTNAME a real domain then every time a program on your machine tries to access a target on that domain your machine will receive the request. Instead use the masquerade feature of sendmail. Edit /etc/mail/sendmail.cf. Find the 'who I masquerade as' line and add the domain to the subsequent line, for example:

DMbanana.com

Note that this will make all messages to banana.com go to your machine.

The next step of spam filtering is SPF: recipient domains query a message's alleged sending domain and marks as spam or rejects messages that didn't originate with it. I happen to administer a domain on an ISP that doesn't so I can use that domain. Ideally your host relays messages from client domains. Don't count on it.

Set the 'from' variable in .mailrc instead.

I will study your post and try some of its tips. In the meanwhile, I tell you, RandomTroll, I think there are two possible causes of conflict here:
One is yahoo.com, the MTA I am sending my test messages through (I send them to my mail box in yahoo) could not like my ISP. I have some experience with this, and it seems it has a bad reputation. The other is authentication, in this case SMTP authentication. Interrogating this ISP, by means of another program, for his SMTP authentication method(s), it identifies the method as 'plain' (only method it identified). I tried mailx -S smtp-auth=... several keywords, from among those given in mailx manual for SMTP.

Besides, I get from them:
which strengthens my suspicion about the ISP. And trying hotmail.com,
which clearly states the message lacks authentication. Regards and thanks for your patience,

Enrique.

I have the same problem with rejection of dynamic IPs. You can address that by paying for a static IP. You will still have the same problem with your ISP being identified as a spammer. You can request removal. A domain I administered got listed mistakenly (a spamster had spoofed our address) and I got it removed from somebody's spammer list. Or you can move to another ISP.

What do you really want to do? I archive, encrypt, and compress my outgoing mail and send it to a domain on which I have a shell account where procmail reverses the process and sends the mail. I use mailx to read mail only.

If you haven't figured it out yet, mailx doesn't fetch mail from other servers. You need to use something else, such as fetchmail, for that.

I know this: I did use, several years ago, and subscripted to the same ISP I am now, and to the same service, Kmail and Window$ Outlook Express successfully to send as well as to receive mail. And I remember well I wrote and receive mail from a friend who used Hotmail.com. What Kmail did, I have to be able to do on the console.

I want to do what a normal end user, call it housewife, architect, etc would do: use the computer to manage my dayly correspondence BUT, on a text mode console. Even elm I woundn't like it because it treats the screen in a GUIish way.
I, as the novice I am, would like you to explain this in greater detail. mailx man says: "mailx - send and receive Internet mail". Of course, the server can be my machine (not my case). But the notifications sent by my ISP server were shown to me by mailx.

It should perhaps be stated kmail (again kmail, but it's just an example) isn't, since the last slackware instalation on this machine, able to send mail to itself (or to any other destination). I will do two things: reinstall Slackware (last time I installed the packages as I needed them) and try kmail. If kmail works fine, then I'll be able to dedicate myself to mailx, fetchmail and the like, but having isolated the problem. If kmail still has problems, I'll install window$ on another machine and try Outlook Express. Having so diagnosed the outer world, and assuming the diagnostics indicate there are no problems outside the machine, I shall be in a position to further investigate, this time, on my side of the cable.

You say you administer a domain on an ISP. I'm glad to be writing, not only to a slacker, but to someone with that kind of knowledge. Regards.

Those programs access remote SMTP & POP servers; mailx doesn't: it uses only the local SMTP server and doesn't use POP at all: it reads only the mail in the local mail spool. You can use a remote SMTP server by configuring sendmail - but that requires a remote SMTP server that will relay your mail. Ideally that would be fibertel, but you have to ask them. mailx is an 'old' program, from the days when users were accounts on large machines that were servers and every server relayed all mail. Spam followed the commercialization of the 'Net; closing one's SMTP server to other relayers followed.

That's a mistake. It doesn't receive mail. It parses and displays the contents of a mail spool file, which some other program has to fetch. On a machine that is its own SMTP server the SMTP server fetches the mail, but on a machine that isn't some other program has to fetch the mail. In the old days everyone used mailx on a machine that was its own SMTP server. Modern mail clients use POP to pick up mail from one's SMTP server. This is so common, and the past so distant (for most users), that they don't understand that it can be any other way.

Your SMTP server sent the messages so it received the notifications from your ISP server and put them in your mail spool file. The ISP server didn't send the messages to exxxx@fibertel but to your SMTP server.

Probably a waste of time.

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Well then: the mailx/sendmail thing postponed until I know a bit --a lot, I'd say, more on *nix/linux and its GNU applications. This thread I'll keep if only to remind me of how complex can things reveal itself to be when one thought it was going to be easy. Besides, it contains useful information. This having been said, I express my kind regards to you. Farewell.