Hello All,

I have a server inside my house hosted on my cable modem. And I can't seem to get it to send emails out. I realize this may be because my ISP is blocking the messages getting sent out, but I want to confirm it is that before I move my server out of my house.

So how I can check to see if sendmail is working or not? I am using Ubuntu 6.10, and as far as I can tell I have installed sendmail correctly using the apt-get install sendmail etc.

What can I do to see if it is actually working or not?

Also, just to let you guys know, I've been trying to send mail using PHPmailer, and also the generic php mail() function. Thanks in advance.

Make sure your forwarding is correct. From the outside try to "telnet your.ip.add.ress 25" see what happens. If not, set up a firewall between you and your modem (or iptables locally) forward 1025 to 25 on the server. Then try "telnet your.ip.add.ress 1025"

Side note, I know at least postfix can be set up to authenticate to your isp's mail server and relay based on your account.

One other question: where is the function php mail() trying to mail to? If it is mailing to a local (to the webserver/mailserver that is) mail account, you should be able to get that mail from the local network. Regardless if they block 25.

I just realized actually that my home router/gateway does not have any forwarding rules in it... I didn't think I would need to set up a rule to allow the mail to go out... Should I do that?

I am emailing to my personal Gmail account. I will try what you suggested. Thank you.

C:\Documents and Settings\t33to>telnet 192.168.1.3 25
Connecting To 192.168.1.3...Could not open connection to the host, on port 25: Connect failed

Is what I get when I try to Telnet locally. Same from outside the network.

Well for me, since I use RR I have to define a smart hosts in /etc/mail/sendmail.mc
define(`SMART_HOST', `smtp-server.satx.rr.com')dnl
If you want to be able to telnet to the box via port 25 you need to have the DAEMON options below set as well.
DAEMON_OPTIONS(`Port=smtp,Name=MTA')dnl
After that you need to do a make -C /etc/mail and restart sendmail ( /sbin/service sendmail restart )

Indeed you have to delete the 127.0.0.1 address in DAEMON_OPTIONS. Sendmail is just listening to 127.0.0.1 if this address is still configured. Or change it to the ip address 192.168.1.3.

Thanks guys. Ill try that out shortly.