Originally posted by: wallewallo

I am using AIX 5.3 and its default sendmail. The server is behind a firewall and uses a DNS
which only resolves internal IP's.
I would like to send emails to a Smart Host(relay) which is able to send the mail to the WWW.

I configured following things in sendmail.mc (copied aixsample.mc to sendmail.mc):
include(`/usr/samples/tcpip/sendmail/m4/cf.m4')

FEATURE(`accept_unresolvable_domains')

FEATURE(`nocanonify')

define(`SMART_HOST',`10.44.15.2')
after that I generated the sendmail.cf. But things don't work if I try to send an email
I get following error:
aix-server:/home/root>echo "test" |sendmail -v myname@hotmail.com
hotmail.com: Name server timeout
myname@hotmail.... Transient parse error -- message queued for future delivery
myname@hotmail.... queued
How can I use sendmail without unconfiguring our internal DNS?
Thanks for an answer

Mike
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Originally posted by: tony.evans

sendmail is the blackest of black arts, I would try a dedicated sendmail forum.

I personally have no idea how to resolve the issue you're seeing, but then I stopped looking at sendmail configurations 5 years ago and hope never to have to do so again.
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Originally posted by: shargus

We do something similar here, but we edit the sendmail.cf file directly.

Here's what we do:

1. Edit /etc/mail/sendmail.cf file as follows:
- Look for the line that starts with DS and add the name of your smart relay (i.e. DSsmartrelay.mydomain.com )
- Look for the line that starts with Dj and add the name of your DNS domain (i.e. Djmydomain.com )
- Security wants us to set "O PrivacyOptions=authwarnings,noexpn,novrfy"

2. Unless your server is actually receiving mail, turn sendmail off. If you are just getting mail from your servers (status, errors, logs, etc.) they don't need to receive mail.

3. AIX sendmail seems to be compiled hard-coded to use DNS for name resolution (in other words, it won't look in /etc/hosts even if netsvc.conf says to). If you have DNS set up, make sure it resolves the relay server properly (forward and reverse lookup). Your error message implies a name resolution issue.

4. Verify your server can get to the mail relay: "telnet smartrelay.mydomain.com 25" and verify the SMTP banner.

5. Send a test mail: cat /etc/issue | mailx -v -s "test email" myemail@mydomain.com
The -v option will show the SMTP conversation. Verify it's able to talk to the relay.

6. We have a cronjob set up to periodically do a "sendmail -q" to flush the mail buffers.
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