Sendmail, BT and smart hosting

[Dominic Mitchell]

On Wed, May 22, 2002 at 12:25:28PM +0100, Tim Wiser wrote:
> Hiya everyone,
> 
> Hope you're all fine on this lovely day!
> 
> I've got a bit of a problem that occurred this morning.  For the past couple
> of months I've been using mail.internet.com as a smart host in Sendmail.
> Mail sent from our company PCs has gone into our local mailserver which has
> then passed it on to that server for sending.  The reason I'm using smart
> hosting is that we're currently on dialup and don't have static IP. That
> will eventually change, but not for a month or so.
> 
> However, this morning, the BT server stopped responding.  I couldn't telnet
> to it on any port, and it didn't ping either.  A call to their tech support
> resulted in me being advised to use mail.btconnect.com instead.  However,
> after putting that address in the /etc/mail/freebsd.mc file, saving it and
> doing make cf, make install and make restart.... mail would not send.  I
> used sendmail -q -v to see what was going on, and it seems that Sendmail is
> providing the local hostname to the smart host instead of the actual dialup
> hostname it's got.
> 
> Does anyone else have this situation? What server are you using?  Help!

You don't actually have to use a smart host at all.  It doesn't
matter that you're on a dynamic IP address.  You can just send the
mail via the normal DNS/MX lookup mechanisms.  Just a thought.

When you say that it's "providing the local hostname", is it doing
it as part of the "HELO" or "EHLO" command, or is it as part of the
"RCPT TO" or "MAIL FROM" commands?  If it's part of the HELO/EHLO,
then their server needs to stop being so picky.  If not, try setting
up masquerading, as described a couple of threads ago.

-Dom