Forum Moderators: coopster
thanks in advance!
I would imagine you have sendmail, conf up sendmail and get it running and the mail function will just work, no rebuilding.
Thanks in advance!
(yes, I've tried doing it by myself and reading material...but please I'd really appreciate it if you'd tell me how to go about this step by step - thanks!)
emails not getting through is another issue all together. You need reverse lookup to resolve among many other things. That is not the same issue by far.
i will see if I can get someone to post about the whole shootin match but it may take a couple of days and you may be more then overwhelmed at the answer to what seemed like a fairly straight forward question.
[redhat.com...]
I'm going to address them in a bottom->up sort of fashion, bottom being the basic necessities of your domain and DNS workings.
> *sigh* I see that I'd need my ISP to delegate a static IP to my nameserver...
Don't host your own nameserver. As you just mentioned, it's a terribly painful and expensive proposition if you're hosting things out of your house. either a) your IP changes and you need to notify your registrar, and it's now a propagation issue or b) you pay tonnes of money for a static IP. It used to be that I could get a second static IP for only $5 a month, now it's usually a requirement that you pay for a business-grade connection to get a pseudo-static IP.
The answer to that? Use a DNS hosting service. Something like Zoneedit or whatnot. I haven't tried any others, but ZE is free and easy to use, and you can use a dynamic updating tool (as simple as a script using lynx) to update your IP.
> hmm..I used to use sendmail but mail() never worked (emails never got sent out)...
Usually the reason for that is one of:
a) Your ISP blocks outbound port 25 connections to ANY outside system except their own (this is the case for me). This means that your ISP won't let your mail server (sendmail) deliver mail directly to the receiving domain's mailserver (the default behaviour).
b) Your mailserver is hosted on a home connection, or unfortunately in a bad subnet that's associated with home IP addresses. Most domains use Blacklists thatban incoming connections from IP addresses that are from ISP's dialup ranges or highspeed ranges. So basically your IP would resolve to a residential connection, and the receving server will say "Hell no! You're a zombie1 I'm not accepting any spam from you!".
> basically the only people who did recieve them were gmail users....the rest of the email providers seemed to bounce back the emails because the server IP of 127.0.0.1 could not be resolved.
That's partly because of the reason above, as well as 127.0.0.1 is not a real address that should be talking to anyone. So you didn't tell sendmail what its hostname was or its IP address, OR you gave your server's hostname the address 127.0.0.1 (ie, in /etc/hosts, you've got:
127.0.0.1 myservernameYou didn't do that, right? Right?
What you need to do to route mail properly and legitimately is to treat your server as though it was a normal desktop. Think about the settings that are necessary for a desktop machine to email out through your ISP. More than likely what you'll need to do is relay through your ISP's mail servers. This is easily accomplished by editing your
/etc/mail/sendmail.cfSearch for a key that says
# "Smart" relay host (may be null)
DS
The line that says just "DS", change it to:
[code]
DSmail.myisp.com
[/code[
(alter mail.myisp.com to the outobund mailserver for your domain).
Restart sendmail, and you should now be able to send mail to any domain.
Anyway, the short answer to a very long and complicated scenario is:
a) Get an external DNS hosting server (There are tonnes of free ones) and use their Dynamic updating service.
b) Set up the DS key in your sendmail config.
Hope that helps. :)
MM
