Sendmail configuration on Debian Sid(for home use only)
 

I have just installed Debian sid and have downloaded the sendmail packages through apt and configured it to the best of my capabilities...which it seems..are not enough..so here i am asking for your help.
i check my mail from my universities mail account and i want to be able to reply to mails through this account(i use pine)...i dont use the universities SMTP server since it has some rcpthosts(i am really very new to sendmail and how it works) error thingi.
anyways i have installed and configured sendmail on my machine and then tried to sendmail.pine shows that it is sending the mail..even though it takes it a while and it actually says it has sent the message out...however i recieve no message(i am mailing back to myself).i do not know why this could be happening.i did not enter any aliases in /etc/mail/aliases or none of that stuff and you can see my sendmail.cf file
here
I am also running a firewall which i created using firestarter and i only opened up ports 22(ssh),80(http) and ftp(i dont know exactly what port that is..22/23?).
i know i have not given you much here but that is because i do not know much.
if you want i can paste my firewall script...though i dont know how that will help.
anyways i would really appreciate any help here.
thanks

Well, first off SMTP uses port 25, so you might want to enable that.

Now let me see if I understand you correctly. You use pine on your local machine to get mail from your college e-mail server. You want to send mail as if you were using that server, but you want to use your own SMTP server instead? Is the computer running sendmail the same computer you're sending mail from? Have you tried sending a test message to a webmail account (like yahoo or hotmail) so you can tell if it's a problem on the recieving end? Please provide more information about the setup of your server and the college's server and what exactly you want to do.

-Dewar

yes...i use pine on my local machine to read mail i get on my universities server.I want to use my own SMTP server to send mail out because if i use my univ's server i can only send a message to the same domain(only mail.utexas.edu...which is the domain name of my univerisities mail server-it provides IMAP mail)...i have tried using my univ's smtp server to addresses like hotmail,yahoo etc. but i get the same error message over and over...hotmail/yahoo/.. is not in the rcpthosts list.
so i want to run my own smtp server on my local machine(there is just one machine the server needs to run for)to send out mail...i dont want it to implement any special/exotic features...just send out my mail thats all.
i did try opening up port 25 and then sending the mail and i get the same problem...pine says the message was sent but no message is recieved...is there a log file for sendmail where i can check what is going on?
hope this explains my situation better.
thanks

Mail logs are usualy kept in /var/log/mail (at least for SuSE) so try there for the logs. A lot of junk can collect in that log, so I suggest test sending a message and then looking in the logs right after.

Also, are you trying to masquerade as your campus's email server (make it so the mails you send have your campus e-mail in the envelope)? If that's the case, you might be rejected because your IP doesn't match the DNS for the campus e-mail server.

Finally, can you send e-mails to other users on your local machine? If not, there might be an error with the sendmail process somewhere.

-Dewar

My mail.err files few ending lines read like this:
Feb 3 14:25:21 prophecy sm-mta[5284]: daemon MTA: problem creating SMTP socket
Feb 3 14:25:21 prophecy sm-mta[5284]: NOQUEUE: SYSERR(root): opendaemonsocket: daemon MTA: server SMTP socket wedged: exiting
Feb 3 14:27:18 prophecy sendmail[5298]: My unqualified host name (prophecy) unknown; sleeping for retry
Feb 3 14:28:18 prophecy sendmail[5298]: unable to qualify my own domain name (prophecy) -- using short name
Feb 3 14:28:18 prophecy sendmail[5298]: My unqualified host name (prophecy) unknown; sleeping for retry
Feb 3 14:29:18 prophecy sendmail[5298]: unable to qualify my own domain name (prophecy) -- using short name
Feb 3 14:40:01 prophecy sm-msp-queue[5377]: My unqualified host name (prophecy) unknown; sleeping for retry
Feb 3 14:41:01 prophecy sm-msp-queue[5377]: unable to qualify my own domain name (prophecy) -- using short name

and my mail.log file is:
Feb 3 14:41:01 prophecy sm-msp-queue[5380]: i11HRJhx000527: to=<rmanocha@mail.utexas.edu>, delay=2+03:13:42, xdelay=00:00:00, mailer=relay, pri=14161872, relay=[127.0.0.1] [127.0.0.1], dsn=4.0.0, stat=Deferred: Connection refused by [127.0.0.1]
Feb 3 14:41:01 prophecy sm-msp-queue[5380]: i118Dlwm001789: to=<rmanocha@cs.utexas.edu>, delay=2+12:26:14, xdelay=00:00:00, mailer=relay, pri=14520567, relay=[127.0.0.1] [127.0.0.1], dsn=4.0.0, stat=Deferred: Connection refused by [127.0.0.1]
Feb 3 14:41:01 prophecy sm-msp-queue[5380]: i1189tGe001765: to=<rmanocha@mail.utexas.edu>, delay=2+12:30:06, xdelay=00:00:00, mailer=relay, pri=14520593, relay=[127.0.0.1] [127.0.0.1], dsn=4.0.0, stat=Deferred: Connection refused by [127.0.0.1]

i will try changing the masquerading thingi...just wondering if there is any GUI application to configure sendmail...?

Unless you understand sendmail.cf, I do not suggest using sendmail. There are other packages that are about equally good such as exim and qmail.

For the record, I've never met anyone who knows how to write sendmail.cf files. They all just take someone else's (who in turn doesn't understand it either, but got it from somewhere else...)

A recipe for disaster.

well...how do i confiure qmail...i did download it but i could not get pine to send messages from it...could you please explain...?