Help with smart host please

[Alan Fiebig]

No, sorry, I should have been clearer.

Its not that my MS server is timing out on DNS lookups of my smarthost, its that sendmail on my MS server is still bothering to lookup the final destination.


For example, lets say that I have a message in /var/spool/mqueue that is to be delivered to 'sam at cucumber.org'. As I have sendmail on my MS server configured to use a smarthost, sendmail should then just blindly forward that message to the smarthost (talia.elknet.net) and let the smarthost firgure out how to get the message to the 'cucumber.org' smtp server.

But, that's not what's happening. Sendmail on my MS server instead is bothering to do a DNS lookup on 'cucumber.org' BEFORE sending it on to the smarthost. If the DNS lookup fails or timesout, then sendmail deferrs the delivery to the smarthost and keeps the message in the queue. Sendmail WILL NOT forward the message on to the smarthost until AFTER it has successfully looked up the destination domain, then it sends it on to the smarthost.

When using a smarthost, my outbound queue should be virtually empty. MS should place a message into the mqueue, and within seconds sendmail should grab it and send it on to the smarthost. But that's not happening, instead, only the message that snedmail successfully does a DNS lookup on are being forwarded, the rest are sitting in the queue deferred until a future time, when sendmail will again try and do a DNS lookup.

Thanks,
-Alan


>I'm probably missing something here, but I'd just add the smarthost to the
>DNS if you're timing out.  Wouldn't that do it?
>
>...Kevin