Folks, I am trying to set up sendmail on my intranet (home) webserver, so that it will send mail via my ISP. I have searched for similar threads including this thread, but the responses do not seem to have solved the problem. All I want is to call sendmail from Perl, to post myself the responses to a test form I am building, using my normal internet mail address. I do not want to receive or relay mail from any host except the web server itself (127.0.0.1).

I have edited sendmail.mc to define SMART_HOST as my isp's mail server and MASQUERADE_AS to be my local network name (which is not a registered domain - it is just the name I have given my home intranet). I have run make and built a fresh sendmail.cf, then restarted sendmail.

Using my form, I am able to submit the message to sendmail, but after 40 seconds the mail log shows a message .

All suggestions (of the relatively polite variety) are welcomed.

It sounds like you may be having a dns issue of some sort, if you do a manual mx lookup of bigpond.com from that machine what do you get (either via dig or nslookup.)

Ah ha! 'dig mail.bigpond.com' returns immediately with the expected data, but 'dig MX mail.bigpond.com' times out. Looks like I need some kind of lookup data, but I am not running my own DNS ( rely on my ISP for that) so wonder what to do next? Sending mail works via Evolution on that box, so the missing link must be somewhere in the sendmail config? Maybe? Thanks for your help on this.

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Thanks, I think. Are you saying that sendmail cannot send mail to the www because my ISP has no MX record? I know that Evolution copes OK, so is there some setting I can twiddle in the sendmail configuration? Thanks for your help.

Grr - read it too fast. Tried 'dig A mail.bigpond.com' which worked OK. What to do next? Thanks.

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Ah - so even if I could get sendmail to resolve the address to bigpond, I might be no further ahead? Sigh. I guess I could set up sendmail as my local network mail solution, but it seems a waste of time if it can't get out to the www. Am I trying to do this the wrong way? Is there a simpler solution I am missing? Thanks again for your input - I am grateful for your time.

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Yep - I have just found out that I need a static IP to do this - bigpond block relays from dynamic addresses. No wonder it would not work! Thanks for the help.

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