For a problem as old as the hills, and probably covered in a FAQ somewhere
which will result in flameage in extremis, I nevertheless seek the wisdom
of the list in a longer-than-necessary email:
I have a single RHL 6.1 box, hooked to a single Win98 box. Two NICs in the
Linux machine, which is hooked to a cable modem and masquerading and Samba
are peachy-keen. No problem there.
The cable modem provides a dynamic IP address, and with it comes a
hostname. The problem is, sendmail and gnome don't like having hostnames
ripped out from under them. Sendmail has to be restarted, and gnome just
quits workingi, forcing Ctrl-Alt-Bkspace. So, I forced the hostname to be
localhost.localdomain, set my ISP's SMTP server to be my smart host, and all
was well.
Or so I thought. It seems that outgoing mail had a header like so, which
was being targetted as spam by some ISPs, and was being routed to the
bit-bucket, without so much as a peep:
Received: from localhost (IDENT:[EMAIL PROTECTED] [127.0.0.1])
by localhost.localdomain (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id WAA10610
Thinking this was the problem, I got a free domain name from dyndns.org,
put that hostname on the Dj line in sendmail.cf and uncommented it, then
I removed the ISP's SMTP server from sendmail.cf so that the smart host
line is now blank. Mail now goes directly to the intended host's exchanger
with the following header:
Received: from localhost (IDENT:[EMAIL PROTECTED] [127.0.0.1])
by somehostname.dyndns.org (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id WAA10610
*This* gets through, but I'm not satisfied. This is a fun hack, but
there's gotta be a better way, and short of a static IP address, I don't
know what that is.
Now before someone suggests that I quit using sendmail -- I've thought of
that. If, for example, I use Netscape's mailer and set the SMTP server
to be my ISP's server instead of localhost, it goes through just fine, with
even better-looking headers. So abandoning sendmail and going with
a "friendly" MUA would be one solution. BUT: I'm addicted to Mutt. I've
tried other mailers, but I keep crawling back to Mutt, configured with vi
as my editor. It does what I want in the way that I want it. It works
well with procmail, which does what I want in the way that I want it. And,
with sendmail, I can toss off quick emails with `mail -s 'subject'
[EMAIL PROTECTED]', which I like to do.
So, although inertia is a big factor I ask: any suggestions?
-W-
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