sendmail & bind

[Damien Elmes]

Leigh Finch <leigh at blueskyinternet.com.au> writes:

> g'day all,
> 	I know this is a little bit off the current topic of conversation but, 
> anyway.
> 
> I'm a bit of a newbie (8 months or so), but I'm having a little trouble with 
> two things, the first is that I'm having trouble getting messages delivered 
> using sendmail, what happens if  send an email to the domain, sendmail wont 
> archive it for retrieval, but if i send it to the particular computer on the 
> domain it will archive it for retrieval via pop3. I have set up bind, 
> although I'm not sure if i have made a mistake, I have put in the mx records, 
> but yet it will still not retrieve it.

MX records are for other mailers out there on the internet. if you
have a MX record on mydomain.com, other mailers know which host to
contact to deliver mail for that domain.

you also need to configure sendmail to actually accept mail for that
domain, though. this is usually done via /etc/sendmail.cw which is a
list of domains that sendmail should consider in the 'w' class - ie,
domains which we will accept mail for, and domains which we will relay
mail for. it is done this way to prevent a mail server from allowing
anybody to send through it - back in the early days of the internet,
anyone was allowed to go through a mail server by default, and thus a
lot of spam got through.

> the other thing is that i can only access sendmail using a loopback, i can't 
> use it's ip or hostname, and when i try to retrieve mail from another 
> computer, it is unable to do so. is there an acl somewhere in the sendmail.cf 
> file, if so, can someone give me an example using the class c network of 
> 192.168.0.*, thanks in advance

when you try and retrieve mail from another computer? apologies if i'm
recapping, perhaps i've misunderstood you here. if you're trying to
retrieve mail from the computer sendmail is running, you'd use POP3,
right? POP3 is provided for in redhat by a daemon such as qpopper, and
the access controls are probably in /etc/xinetd/..

cheers!

-- 
Damien Elmes
resolve at repose.cx