[TriLUG] Any sendmail gurus out there?

[Brian Daniels]

Sendmail on Fedora 10 is doing something weird...

I use mutt for my local mail, and sendmail with a smarthost setting to send 
messages on their way.  This worked fine in Fedora 8.

I recently upgraded (?) to Fedora 10, and copied over my sendmail.mc file to 
recreate my config.  It has the line:
define(`SMART_HOST',`[sasl.smtp.pobox.com]')dnl
which has the [] so that sendmail will send directly to that address and not 
attempt a MX lookup.  

This works fine for a while, with messages sending as expected:

Dec  4 13:27:19 localhost sendmail[13531]: STARTTLS=client, 
relay=sasl.smtp.pobox.com., version=TLSv1/SSLv3, verify=OK, 
cipher=DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA, bits=256/256
Dec  4 13:27:20 localhost sendmail[13531]: mB4IRIWT013529: 
to=<test at test.com>, delay=00:00:02, xdelay=00:00:02, mailer=relay, 
pri=120723, relay=sasl.smtp.pobox.com. [208.72.237.25], dsn=2.0.0, stat=Sent 
(Ok: queued as 6F4421818B)


But later messages will start getting stuck in the queue:

Dec  4 09:15:26 localhost sendmail[13093]: mB4EFPhY013091: to=<test at test.com>, 
delay=00:00:01, xdelay=00:00:00, mailer=relay, pri=121215, 
relay=[sasl.smtp.pobox.com], dsn=4.0.0, stat=Deferred: Name server: 
[sasl.smtp.pobox.com]: host name lookup failure

Sendmail appears to be trying to resolve [sasl.smtp.pobox.com], brackets and 
all.  Which never works, and the messages stay stuck there until I restart 
sendmail.  At which point it suddenly remembers how it's supposed to work and 
sends the messages out.

I'm about ready to make an hourly cron job to restart sendmail, but I hate 
treating symptoms...

--Brian

-- 
Be it thy course to busy giddy minds
With foreign quarrels; that action, hence borne out,
May waste the memory of the former days.
			Henry IV, Part 2
	

Brian Daniels                  bitmage at pobox.com
      http://www.eviloverlord.net