i can telnet to my sendmail

[Jason Balicki]

>Im sorry if my questions sound so cryptic, its just that
>everytime I find
>something out with senmail, 3 other issues pop up and its hard
>to keep track

Break it down.  The first thing you want to check is wether
or not sendmail is listening on port 25.  Other posts have
already talked about that, but one more bit of advice:

open a session to your Linux box running Sendmail and type

tail -f /var/log/maillog

this will display real-time messages that relate to mail.

When you try to telnet, telnet to the inside IF:

telnet 192.168.1.126 25

and see if sendmail answers -- this will take your router out
of the loop -- you might have some routing issues so we
want to eliminate that for the time being.

If it answers, try doing a test mail, right from the mail client:

(hint anything prepended by # is stuff you type, anything not
is a response from the system)

#telnet 192.168.1.126 25

220 yourdomain.com SMTP Sendmail (more crap that may or may not be there)

#helo yourdomain.com

250 yourdomain.com

#mail from: me at you.com

250 Ok

#rcpt to: real at address.com  (please see below)

250 Ok

#data

354 End data with <CR><LF>.<CR><LF>

#blah blah
#.

250 Ok: queued as <SOME (important) GOBBLDEYGOOK>

#quit

221 Bye

(in case anyone's wondering, yes, those are postfix responses,
not sendmail -- the responses will be similar, though.)

about the rcpt to: part:  use something like
root at whatever.you.named.the.system
or perhaps just root without an @ or domain part -- we're
not worried about the mailer table at this point, we just
want to make sure the system is receiving mail.

root should have mail waiting for him in the local spool,
and you should have seen some messages about the connection
show up in the window that has the tail -f /var/log/maillog
going in it.

I'm going to stop there for now, I don't want to put too much
into this if it's not going the right direction.

--J(K)