[gentoo-user] Sendmail woes

[gentoo-user] Sendmail woes

[Александър Л. Димитров]

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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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Re: [gentoo-user] Sendmail woes

[Norberto Bensa]

Александър Л. Димитров wrote:
> 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...

I use gmx.net too. If you would like to try postfix, I'll give you my 
configuration :)

Best regards,
Norberto
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Re: [gentoo-user] Sendmail woes

[Александър Л. Димитров]

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On 00:58 Mon 16 Jul     , Norberto Bensa wrote:
> I use gmx.net too. If you would like to try postfix, I'll give you my 
> configuration :)

Thanks :-) - I'm already using Postfix as a mailserver on my machines work where
I'm using a more sophisticated setup as they are functioning as a mail
relay server for the whole floor. I wanted to try sendmail however just
to get more familiar with it. ;-)

Regards,
	Aleks

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[gentoo-user] Re: Sendmail woes

[reader]

Александър Л. Димитров <aleks_d@gmx.de> writes:

> 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.

Yes it is and in my experience you will get help there.  Keep your
fingers crossed for Per Hedlund to respond if you do post there.

Keep in mind that I have configured sendmail so many times I can't
even count them but every time I have to completely refresh my memory.
What I'm getting at is that any advice I give here may be tainted with
poorly remembering the steps I've been thru.

With the part about sendmail not knowing what host it is running on:
You can solve this by how you list the localhost in /etc/hosts.

I don't remember the exact reasons or format but I believe sendmail
calls `gethostbyname' which looks first at /etc/hosts.

This is the format I currently have:

127.0.0.1    reader.local.lan        reader     localhost

In your case you might try (to conform with the posted sendmail.mc):

  127.0.0.1    myhost.local      myhost      localhost

A further point about documentation... you may have mentioned this
but I did not see it.

The document /usr/share/sendmail-cf/README
Has a lot of help but may be thin on exact details at times.

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Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Sendmail woes

[Александър Л. Димитров]

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On 08:14 Mon 16 Jul     , reader@newsguy.com wrote:
> Yes it is and in my experience you will get help there.  Keep your
> fingers crossed for Per Hedlund to respond if you do post there.

Thanks. I'll RTFS as soon as I finish my last exam (Wednesday - I guess
*that's* what I'm keeping my fingers crossed for atm... ;-) ) and if I
don't find the reason I'll look into the sendmail mailing list.

> I don't remember the exact reasons or format but I believe sendmail
> calls `gethostbyname' which looks first at /etc/hosts.

Yes, I read that in the docs. I made up the domain .local and
everything's completely fine now - I just wonder _why exactly_ sendmail
needs to have an imaginatory domain name.

> A further point about documentation... you may have mentioned this
> but I did not see it.
> 
> The document /usr/share/sendmail-cf/README
> Has a lot of help but may be thin on exact details at times.

Thanks, I've read through most of the stuff in the /usr/share/doc/sendmail*/
directory and also through the online docs at sendmail.org and a lot of
stuff on the net I googled for (like installation instructions for
majordomo). They all essentially say that sendmail.cf should have one of
the following: either `Tuser' or `Ctuser' or
`Ft/file/with/trusted/users'. I tried all of them and though

# egrep '^T' sendmail.cf 
Troot
Tdaemon
Tuucp
Taleks

seems to be OK I still don't seem to have any luck. I usually generate
sendmail.cf through m4 and senmdmail.mc, but even with editing
sendmail.cf manually I don't get any results...

Thanks,
	Aleks

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