spam getting through without even being checked

[Chris Yuzik]

Ken A wrote:
> did you disable sendmail?
>
> chkconfig sendmail off
> service sendmail stop
>
Ken,

I think you're on to something. That said, if I turn off sendmail, then 
my machine stops listening for incoming connections on port 25.

One hint as to what might be going on would be what I see when I start 
up sendmail with a "service sendmail start":

    Starting sendmail:                                         [  OK  ]
    Starting sm-client:                                        [  OK  ]


This seems unusual to me. I've looked through the sendmail_app_init file 
in /etc/rc.d/init.d but honestly, shell scripting isn't my thing (so not 
exactly sure what I'm looking at). Any thoughts?

Chris