More sendmail help? (Alexander Dalloz)

[Paul Howarth]

On Thu, 2005-03-10 at 07:20 +0000, William John Murray wrote: 
> 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.

This still looks like a DNS issue. What's the output of:

$ dig smtp.cs.com
$ dig smtp.cs.com +trace
$ dig @dns-01.ns.cs.com 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

I wonder if your sendmail is using proper domain names.

Do you have any masquerade options set in your sendmail.mc?

What is the output of "hostname" on this box?

> 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.

I'm not too surprised that AOL's server is rejecting your *entirely
empty* email. Try adding some headers, a blank line and a message body
between "data" and "."

Paul.
-- 
Paul Howarth <paul at city-fan.org>