Sendmail - problem receiving external mail
 

Hi all,

I have setup a mail server that is currently capable of sending and receiving mails within the localhost, and also able to send mails to any external account such as gmail or yahoomail...

My main problem is that I am simply not able to receive any mails outside my domain like gmail... (I am a student in a university and use the university DNS as my primary DNS)

I already have a mail server (set up by someone else and is working fine...) and I wanted to add a new mail server similar to the existing one. I have the MX record setup in our DNS....

I compared most configurations with both these systems and found most of them same.

Can anyone please tell me what might be the problem?

Thanks a lot,
Manudath

My money is on the fact that they are filtering the SMTP and IMAP/POP ports out.

Hi,

I dont know whether they are filtering smtp or other ports because the server that is currently running works fine...

Anyway, I did an "iptables -L" on the new machine and this is the line I got for smtp... Can you please let me know whether this is of any help?

ACCEPT tcp -- anywhere anywhere state NEW tcp dpt:smtp

I wasnt able to figure out what the -- are for.... Also the last part "state NEW ..." was a little cryptic...

Hi,

This is the error when I tried to send from my gmail account...

Technical details of failure:
PERM_FAILURE: SMTP Error (state 10): 550 root@xxx.xx.xx ...Relaying denied

What can I do to solve this?

Thanks a lot....

Your mailserver probably doesn't recognise xxx.xx.xx as its local hostname. You have to tell it that mail sent to xxx.xx.xx should be treated local.

What mailserver are you using anyway? And what tools to configure it?

Groetjes,

Kees-Jan

I am using Sendmail 8.12 on Redhat Enterprise WS...

I used the standard procedure -> download tar, compile, build and install sendmail... and tweak the sendmail.mc to configure.... (basically there was hardly any changes that I made... everything looked ok)

According to the documentation, sendmail calls "gethostname" followed by "gethostbyname" to establish its identity. So the result of this (whatever that is for your system) should be the same as the stuff behind the @ sign in your e-mail addresses, and the same as the hostname in your DNS entries.

If this is not (like I said before), then you need to rename your host or define alternate identities, which is described here

Groetjes,

Kees-Jan

Hmm... After some testing, I found that nothing was wrong in the configurations.... It was just that my DNS was not allowing this particular hostname...

I changes the hostname to the one that is working now, and restarted the system, I was easily able to make it work...

Anyways, Thanks a lot for the replies...