Beginning 3 days ago every message I send to myself sendmail tries to relay through my remote e-mail server (gmail). Because my own domain is imaginary I get an error message back. I haven't changed sendmail's configuration files. My computer serves my local domain. sendmail has stopped recognizing that my domain is local and not to relay local mail. sendmail 8.15.2

Looking at your other mail related post, I'd say that something has changed on your mail server.

Did these happen at the same time?

If you have not changed anything, then you should investiagte whether your mail server has been compromised in some way.

It's a network-setup problem and, maybe, a permissions problem with sendmail (/var/spool/mqueue had the wrong owner and permissions too). I thought I needed PPPOE so I installed it and it changed resolv.conf. I had backups, but it took me a while to consider it the problem.

When I start sendmail it returns:

When I send a message with mailx as myself sendmail returns the same error; when I send the same message with sendmail it doesn't. When I send it with mailx as root it goes through.

What message is sm-msp-queue trying to write? 127.0.0.1 is present - I can ping it. I don't usually run a name server but running one to resolve local addresses makes no difference. Is it a matter of sendmail listening to 127.0.0.1?

I assume this is a simple problem, that a sendmail expert would know off-hand, but comp.mail.sendmail is hit-and-miss (many questions unanswered). Is there a better forum?

I've stopped using mailx (which I use only for crontab jobs to send me reminders, and that's in a script, so I had to change it in only 1 place) but I'd like to understand what's going on.

sounds like you deleted the loopback definition from the /etc/hosts file.

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It's there. Good suggestion though.