Check your /etc/hosts. Had a similar problem where 127.0.0.1 was being mapped to the full hostname of the computer and hence to the computer's Internet-accessible address (not to 127.0.0.1 or localhost) and, since it isn't sendmail doesn't want to relay from outside hosts that connect, I believe this causes the problem.

My /etc/hosts first looked like this:

127.0.0.1 myhostname.com myhostname localhost.localdomain localhost

But when I changed it to

127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost
1.2.3.4 myhostname.com myhostname


where 1.2.3.4 is my IP address, things worked. See if this helps.

I got Sendmail to work on a dial-up connection, and with just localhost.localdomain, but it required some masquerading of the message headers. This is the file I used.


divert(-1)
dnl This is the macro config file used to generate the /etc/sendmail.cf
dnl file. If you modify the file you will have to regenerate the
dnl /etc/sendmail.cf by running this macro config through the m4
dnl preprocessor:
dnl
dnl m4 /etc/mail/sendmail.mc > /etc/sendmail.cf
dnl
dnl You will need to have the sendmail-cf package installed for this to
dnl work.
include(`/usr/share/sendmail-cf/m4/cf.m4')dnl
VERSIONID(`sendmail.mc - ee553@ncf.ca')

OSTYPE(linux)
define(`ALIAS_FILE',`/etc/aliases')
FEATURE(masquerade_envelope) FEATURE(genericstable, `hash -o /etc/mail/genericstable')
GENERICS_DOMAIN_FILE(`/etc/mail/genericsdomain')
define(`SMART_HOST',`smtp.ncf.carleton.ca')
define(`confTO_QUEUEWARN', `16h')
MAILER(local)
MAILER(smtp)



Yhe complete instructions are at:



http://www.sendmail.org/~ca/email/offline_mailing.html


It works great, except I'd like to have fetchmail start when the ppp connection starts. Any ideas as how to accomplish this?

Harry

I finally opted for POSTFIX.

Got it to work after I allowed it to relay through my ISP's mail service.

I decided to use WEBMIN to configure it. 'Tools all of five minutes.

I will try to work on SENDMAIL later...

good choice

I had the same problem and was able to fix it by editting the /etc/resolv.conf to search my local domain:
--
nameserver 123.123.123.123
search mydomain.com
--

(I had inadvertantly put only "com" in as a placeholder when I was installing the OS and sendmail resolved it to localhost.com, !?)

hope this keeps someone else from pulling out all the hair that got me to this 'simple' fix.

I had the same problem on a couple of RH8 system that use sendmail. There's a line near the bottom of sendmail.mc that reads:

DAEMON_OPTIONS(`Port=smtp,Addr=127.0.0.1, Name=MTA')

If you change this to read:

dnl DAEMON_OPTIONS(`Port=smtp,Addr=127.0.0.1, Name=MTA')

you've effectively commented it out. Unless you do that mail stays stuck on the system.

You know, there was another thread about a week ago that involved this very same problem (no mail flowing and ``localhost.com'' showing up in the logs). The poster never did resolve it until he reinstalled the sendmail packages.

Apparently, Red Hat's making it easy for people to hose their mail setup.

Look at /etc/resolv.con

I had the same trouble, and add to the first line of /etc/resolv.conf

search mi-isp-name.com
nameserver mi-isp-dns-server
nameserver mi-isp-2nd-dns-server


Good luck.