More sendmail help? (Alexander Dalloz)

[William John Murray]

[Still having problems with reply to list]
Am Mi, den 09.03.2005 schrieb William John Murray um 8:58:
>
>>       I am trying to use smtp.aol.com as relay at the moment...
>> Here is the command OP: But I am lost as to what "address testing
mode"
>> is doing. Is this good?
>> 
>> echo '/mx aol.com' | /usr/lib/sendmail -bt -d8.8
>> ADDRESS TEST MODE (ruleset 3 NOT automatically invoked)
>> Enter <ruleset> <address>
>> > getmxrr(aol.com, droplocalhost=0)
>> getmxrr(aol.com) returns 4 value(s):
>>         mailin-01.mx.aol.com.
>>         mailin-04.mx.aol.com.
>>         mailin-02.mx.aol.com.
>>         mailin-03.mx.aol.com.
>
>It is fine and tells us that name resolution through Sendmail works
>properly on your host.
>Take the Paul's advice and place the ISP's smart host name into squared
>brackets: [smtp.aol.com]. This prevents Sendmail from trying to find
the
>MX through DNS. You then should no longer get an error "stat=Deferred:
>Name server: smtp.aol.com: host name lookup failure".
>The "stat=Data format error" you get when authentication against the
>ISP's smart host fails. You can probe authentication manually by
running
>the (E)SMTP manually using telnet to port 25. google.com holds several
>examples on how to do that.
>
>Alexander

Thanks Paul and Alexander, 
             The [smtp.aol.com] does SOMTHING; because if I use it the
error changes to "Name server: smtp.cs.com.: host name lookup failure"
and smtp.aol.com was an alias for smtp.cs.com. I then tried using this,
with or without [], and I get:

relay=smtp.cs.com. [205.188.159.185], dsn=5.6.0, stat=Data format error

Is that progress?

If I try the telnet idea, then 2 times out of 3 I get 
"Connection closed by foreign host."
but I did manage to do:

telnet smtp.aol.com 25
Trying 205.188.159.185...
Connected to smtp.aol.com (205.188.159.185).
Escape character is '^]'.
220 smtp-los01.proxy.aol.com ESMTP Sendmail 8.12.11/8.12.11; Wed, 9 Mar
2005 18:02:14 -0500
mail from: w.murray at rl.ac.uk
250 2.1.0 w.murray at rl.ac.uk... Sender ok
rcpt to: w.murray at cern.ch
250 2.1.5 w.murray at cern.ch... Recipient ok
data
354 Enter mail, end with "." on a line by itself
Here we go
.
554 5.7.1 (IPT:S1) http://postmaster.info.aol.com/ipt AOL has identified
this mail to be unsolicited bulk email.
quit
221 2.0.0 smtp-los01.proxy.aol.com closing connection
Connection closed by foreign host.

Nothing ever arrived, presumably because of the spam trap. But it looks
like this worked?
I did try to craft a non-spam mail, but never got anything past the
filter.

  Sorry to be so slow...thanks VERY much for helping...
    Bill