sendmail stat=Deferred: Connection timed

snq · 12-18-2010, 10:32 AM

I am using the default configuration of sendmail which comes with CentOS5 and want to test sending mail to an external address

I use the follwing command to send mail

Code:

 mail -s Test22 linuxnewbie@gmail.com < /dev/null

the mail gets queued in mailq however does not gets delivered

the var/log/maillog says that

Code:

Dec 16 22:32:45 localhost sendmail[3337]: oBH3UiaH003335: to=<linuxnewbie@gmail.com>, delay=00:02:01, xdelay=00:02:01, mailer=esmtp, pri=120408, relay=aspmx.l.google.com. [209.85.227.27], dsn=4.0.0, stat=Deferred: Connection timed out with aspmx.l.google.com.

what is causing the mail to be held in mail queue?

As the system is able to find gmail.com MX address aspmx.l.google.com so I believe that there is no connectivity issue, there must be something the the default sendmail config which is causing the mail to be held ? please guide

bathory · 12-18-2010, 11:39 AM

Hi,

Could be that your box public IP is not resolvable. If you want to run a mail server, its IP must be resolve to a valid domain name.
You can use your ISP mail server as a smarthost to send email to external domains. To do this, open sendmail.cf, find the line that starts with DS and change it to:

Code:

DSmail-isp.domain.com

Restart sendmail and test.

Note that it's advisable to edit sendmail configuration through sendmail.mc and then rebuild sendmail.cf. See here for details.

Regards