[gentoo-user] Sendmail woes

["Александър Л. Димитров" <aleks_d@gmx.de>]

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Hello all,

      Probably the sendmail-list would be the better place for this rant
but I think I'll check with you guys first, just to see whether or not
I've missed something obvious.

I'm trying to get sendmail to work properly on my laptop. It's forwarding
all mail to the smarthost `mail.gmx.net' [1]. That's a free German
service - and I'm considering leaving it looking at the trouble they're
causing...

Now first of all, I'm using a dial-up connection (ADSL PPPoE) - So my IP
adresses are changing on a regular basis and I'm not registered with any
dynamic DNS-service. I don't have a FDQN and I don't want/need one, do I? 
/etc/conf.d/hostname contains just `HOSTNAME="mymachine"', where `mymachine' 
is how I called my machine. I did not set te domain name. Is there a 
reason I should? So /etc/hosts just contains

127.0.0.1	localhost mymachine
::1		localhost

Fair enough. But sendmail does not like this setup. When starting it via
the init scripts it lags seriously and checking the logs gives:

Jul 16 02:06:14 [sendmail] My unqualified host name (localhost) unknown; sleeping for retry
Jul 16 02:07:14 [sendmail] unable to qualify my own domain name (localhost) -- using short name

... repeatedly. Whether or not I set HOSTNAME to be some
$phantasy_value or just `localhost' does not make any difference.
BUT if I set my hostname to something as stupid as
`mymachine.foo' (LITERAL `foo') _or even_ just `mymachine.' sendmail stops 
to complain and starts immediately (Yes, I restarted /etc/init.d/hostname). 
What's the deal?
Why this stupid behaviour? Why does it want to have a `.' in the
hostname - why do I have to trick it so that it thinks it has a domain
where in reality it does not?

Anyways, now with sendmail up and running, I want to send e-mails. Alas,
it seems impossible. Sendmail seems to ignore 50% of its configuration
files. First of all, you might notice the X-Authentication-Warning
flag in this email's header. Well, for mail.gmx.net to accept an e-mail
I have to invoke sendmail with the `-fmyemailaddress@gmx.de' flag, wich
causes sendmail to add this header for obvious anti-spamming reasons.
That's fine and sendmail seems to offer a mechanism which can circumvent
the printing of this warning to the message's headers: trusted users. So
I add my user to trusted useres using this directive in sendmail.mc

define(`confTRUSTED_USERS', `me')dnl

rebuild sendmail.cf, restart sendmail and - nothing happens. I tried
different mechanisms, for example /etc/mail/trusted-users and the
according directives. To no avail. Sendmail ignores them all.

Without the `-fsomeemailaddress' flag, I can't send any e-mail at all
because mail.gmx.net will give me only negative responses like `Service
unavailable' and a message which says something like `this server does
not accept empty envelopes from'. It stops after the `from' leaving the
whole sentence ungrammatical...

What am I doing wrong? I'll give you my sendmail.mc in
case it helps:

sendmail.mc
===================
divert(-1)
divert(0)dnl
include(`/usr/share/sendmail-cf/m4/cf.m4')dnl
VERSIONID(`$Id: sendmail-procmail.mc,v 1.2 2004/12/07 01:59:31 g2boojum Exp $')dnl
OSTYPE(linux)dnl
DOMAIN(generic)dnl
define(`SMART_HOST',`mail.gmx.net')dnl
MASQUERADE_AS(`gmx.de')dnl
FEATURE(masquerade_envelope)dnl
MASQUERADE_DOMAIN(mymachine.local)dnl
dnl define(`confTRUSTED_USERS',`me')dnl
define(`confAUTH_MECHANISMS', `DIGEST-MD5 CRAM-MD5 LOGIN PLAIN')dnl
define(`confPRIVACY_FLAGS', `novrfy,noexpn')dnl
FEATURE(`authinfo',`hash /etc/mail/auth/client-info')dnl
FEATURE(`smrsh',`/usr/sbin/smrsh')dnl
FEATURE(`local_lmtp',`/usr/sbin/mail.local')dnl
FEATURE(`local_procmail')dnl
MAILER(local)dnl
MAILER(smtp)dnl
MAILER(procmail)dnl

I have tried /various/ configurations and read _a lot_ of docs most of
the relevant sections of O'Reillys sendmail book. I did not find my
mistake so far. There are two issues to be resolved and they are
independant:

1) Why does sendmail ignore me as a trusted user? If I execute mutt as
root and send the e-mail it does not issue an x-auth warning
2) What's wrong with all those domains?

I'll appreciate even _reading_ through this lenghty mail, let alone
_answering_ - so thanks to anybody willing to help

Yours,
	Aleks

P.S. while writing the e-mail I've already concluded that I'll just
leave the domains as they are and use the `-f' switch, but only with
`-faleks_d', because I don't have the e-mail address `aleks@gmx.de', but
that's my username on _my_ machine. So the most pressing issue is to let
sendmail send mail that does not include this ugly
X-Authentication-Warning header. It's really ugly, you must admit ;-)


[1] but it's qmail, how can it be smart then? ... :-P

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