[H-GEN] Vanishing Email.

Steven Lawrance steven at sia.net.au
Thu Sep 21 22:18:43 EDT 2000


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Ben Fowler <fowlerb at optushome.com.au> (22 Sep 2000 10:46 +1000):
> My system (reptile) is sitting behind a masqerading firewall.  I've got
> sendmail configured to use a smarthost (the abovementioned mail machine),
> so when I send mail from mutt, mail _should_ be getting to where it's
> supposed to.
> 
> However, it's not happing that way.  I can send mail to Hotmail, and it
> arrives OK, however mail addressed to anywhere at QUT and many other places
> disappears into the wide blue yonder, never to be seen again.

I had similar problems, can't offer much of a solution but maybe I can
say what's going on.

Some smtpds are configured to be a little bit picky about who they
receive mail from.. in the way they only accept mail from machines
whose hostnames resolve (stops some spam).  What happens is.. if you
don't use the smarthost, you will see the mail not being delivered
(something like "551 sender domain must resolve").  So when your mail
is sent through the smarthost, it tries to deliver it.. the other end
refuses, because it originated from say, foo.blah, which doesn't
resolve.  Now, of course, the smarthost tries to return the error to
user at foo.blah...

My solution is to make sendmail think its hostname is something that
resolves.  It'd help if username at that.hostname.dom got delivered to
you, too.

HTH, my understanding of this subject isn't too grand

-- 
Steven Lawrance        RSA 2048/0x9F030653
stl at tmbg.net        DH/DSS 1024/0x76F301DE
http://www.resentment.org/~stl/ (for keys)

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