This is more of a tip and trick but still a success in order to help others.

But when using Evolution, if you ever come across this error when attempting to send/reply mail:

MAIL FROM response error: command unrecognized

This is due to a problem or bug in glibc which seems to just give us random string chunks from the /etc/hosts file.

To fix the problem, just remove all the lines and even empty lines in your /etc/hosts file.

Cheers.

PS. I only found one other site/mailing list that explained this problem when using Evolution mail, so hopefully this will help anyone in the future looking for solutions when they encounter this problem. And I just can't help myself, when in a GUI I just prefer Evolution over most other mail clients but pine is still the best for console based email..

I have to admit, I didn't think this would work, but I tried it anyway. Much to my surprise, it worked! Bizarre.

Interestingly, I'm using Slackware, and am connecting to Austin, TX's Road-Runner servers too. I wonder if there's something peculiar about that mix?

Thanks for the tip! Saved me a heck of a lot of trouble.

Yes, very strange error indeed and glad its helped others out as it took me forever to find the solution myself when setting up Evolution in Slackware on one of my machines.

Cheers.

I've been droning on that problem for almost a week....

Sheeeeesssshhh.....

Thanks.
Really I mean it.

jdif

holy cow, i just had that error, and thank god for LQ or i never would have figured out how to fix it. what a weird error, is there a bug report filed with the evolution people? (road runner here, too, btw.) thanks trickykid.

update: just wanted to document what i did: moved /etc/hosts to /etc/hosts.sus, launched evolution and sent out a test email, closed evolution, moved /etc/hosts.sus back to /etc/hosts, and evolution has continued working properly since then. cheers.

I just commented out the 127.0 line and it worked. One question though, don't you need that line? Won't you get a error on restart that your localhost couldn't be found, blah blah

FX

Its for loopback only. Why not just remove the crud that isn't even used and taking up space. If you know what the hosts file does.. really no reason to keep the explanation and description of the file in there that is taking up space..

Here is what I meant. I don't think I want to comment out the

"127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain laptop" line.

Thats the only way I wouldn't get that error.




#
# /etc/hosts: static lookup table for host names
#

#<ip-address> <hostname.domain.org> <hostname>
127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain laptop

# End of file

FX

Why not just change your localhost line to this instead as you don't need all of that in there:

Nope I still get the same thing. In order for it to work I have to have that line commented out.

FX

Ahh thanx m8, you saved my "almost" lost soul!
Been bugging with this problem for almost a week now

And it worked, thanx"!

hmmm....That does allow Evolution to work, but now it generates an error after a reboot. Does anyone know exactly why this allows us to send mail? I would hope somebody sent a bug report to Ximian but I don't see anything on there website.

Its got to do with something in which glibc I think is in correspondence with Evolution is trying to read the whole hosts file, ignoring the commented # marks in it.

What kind of errors are you getting at boot specifically? The only reason you should get errors at boot by only removing # commented lines in the files is if you accidently removed something you should not have.

you're right, I don't get errors on boot. I actually get them when starting Gnome.

I will post the error, but where does Gnome log errors?

Shucks!

I totally missunderstood the workaround. I was commenting out the entire file (which works fine except when Gnome starts).

But the workaround is to remove all of the comments. And now after re-reading your post it makes for sense to me.

Sorry for the premature post!