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webhansonFlag for United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

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Sendmail sending to a smarthost

Hi

I have recently reconfigured sendmail and configured to send via a smarthost.

This appears to be working fine for all domains apart from one, ours!

Our intranet sends email to our own employees (mydomain.com) and also to clients (at external domains/mail servers hosted by the clients). The email to clients is working, however emailing to our own employees isn't getting through.

Sendmail forwards to our smarthost (smarthost.com).

In the syslog I see the same logs for a mail to a client domain (that works) and to our own domain (that never arrives).

Does anyone know how I would start to diagnose the issue?

If you need anymore information,
let me know

Thanks
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Frosty555
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Sendmail routes "external" domain names through your smarthost, like normal.

But domain names that are configured to be "local" sendmail will route directly, and not use your smarthost. This is because Sendmail expects to receive mail on those local hostnames, so presumably if it routed that through the smarthost, the smart host would just send the mail right back to it, and this would create a loop.

If you aren't using Sendmail to accept emails, and it is just an outbound router (e.g. you have another smtp server accepting emails for your organization somewhere like Exchange Server), then you need to remove your organizations' domain from Sendmail's "local host names" list, which I think is available here:

/etc/mail/local-host-names

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/sendmail.html
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ASKER

Hi Frosty,

Your assumption of what I'm looking for is spot on, and that is for sendmail to just as act as an outbound router to my smarthost!!

However I don't have mydomain.com specified in the local-host-names.... any other ideas?

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webhanson
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The specific settings you need will depend upon your configuration requirements. However the above settings work well in conjunction with masquerading on a sendmail server that is not used to receive email for domains that you are sending as.