FC7 - using FC5 sendmail.mc - and all mail going into blackhole

[B Wooster]

On 8/20/07, B Wooster <bwooster47 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I use SMART_HOST to relay my mail to smtp.rcn.com - and this worked
...
> So, smtp.rcn.com accepts my sendmail messages, and throws it away.
> kmail smtp.rcn.com accepts the mail, and processes it correctly.
>
> Maddening... what could be wrong with sendmail setup?

I wish rcn.com would reject an message if it did not intend sending it
along - but I guess with all the spam mail issues (I myself get 1-5
real messages for every 100 spam messages), they do what they need
to...

The problem turned out to the an invalid From header in the sendmail
generated envelope. This was hard to debug - only found this out by
using postfix, and that worked fine, so dug around with sendmail, and
sendmail requires GENERICS_DOMAIN_FILE(`/etc/mail/genericsdomain') be
correct - it must have actual host name with domain otherwise it seems
like sendmail will not rewrite the From header using the
FEATURE(`genericstable'), and this, it ends up with an un-resolveable
address at smtp.rcn.com, which is why (my best guess) it drops the
message.
kmail, pine, just use a simple mechanism to fill in the From field,
and therefore those worked very easily.

I have sendmail.mc and all the generics* files all fixed now, and
email sending is finally working.
[does anyone know of a way to have sendmail print out the envelope of
the message it is sending out? I found some debug options for
rewriting rules, but that was not the issue here, the issue was the
envelope masquerading - and I wonder if there is a way to debug
sendmail out (without going to the trouble of putting up a network
filter on the communication line)].