UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

One of the applications sends mail to the users on daily basis. It sends mail within (internal users) the firewall (e.g., username@companyname.com) and not sending mail outside (external users) the firewall (e.g., username@yyyy.com). When we contacted the admin people they informed us to register in SMTP, We registered it but still it is not sending mail to the external users. We have hardcoded the from address in the Perl script but when we checked the log it shows the group id of the application. We don't understand why it's taking the group id instead of the from id which we have hardcoded in the script. I understand that something needs to be changed in the sendmail.cf file but I don't have access to do that. Can anyone please give me some suggestion for this issue? Please let me know what needs to be changed so that I can talk to the admin people about this or even correct me if am in the wrong path. Thanks in advance.

A firewall only sees packets -- ports and IP addresses, and perhaps system statistics like who generated the packet. It doesn't genuinely understand the content of the packets, and won't know it was an email destined for x.

Can you show an example of the logs you get? And please explain in more detail what your system is and how your firewall and mail servers are configured.

Code:

From sigma601@eccws533.dearborn.cn.com  Wed Mar  7 01:25:18 2012
Return-Path: <sigma601@eccws533.dearborn.cn.com>
Received: from eccws533.dearborn.cn.com (localhost [127.0.0.1])
 by eccws533.dearborn.cn.com (8.12.11.20060308/8.12.10/1) with ESMTP id q276PI75008571
 for <sigma601@eccws533.dearborn.cn.com>; Wed, 7 Mar 2012 01:25:18 -0500
Received: (from sigma601@localhost)
 by eccws533.dearborn.cn.com (8.12.11.20060308/8.12.10/Submit) id q27601S9022202
 for sigma601; Wed, 7 Mar 2012 01:00:01 -0500
Date: Wed, 7 Mar 2012 01:00:01 -0500
Message-Id: <201203070600.q27601S9022202@eccws533.dearborn.cn.com>
From: root@eccws533.dearborn.cn.com (Cron Daemon)
To: sigma601@eccws533.dearborn.cn.com
Subject: Cron <sigma601@eccws533> /proj/6-sigma/www/batch/6sigma_batch.sh
X-Cron-Env: <SHELL=/bin/sh>
X-Cron-Env: <HOME=/proj/6-sigma>
X-Cron-Env: <PATH=/usr/bin:/bin>
X-Cron-Env: <LOGNAME=sigma601>

This is the log

---------- Post updated at 10:24 PM ---------- Previous update was at 10:23 PM ----------

We dont have access to the configuration file. So have no idea about the configuration part

---------- Post updated at 10:27 PM ---------- Previous update was at 10:24 PM ----------

The from address we have given as 6sigma@cn.com but if you see the log it is taking the groupid which is sigma601 and with the server name appended after @ sign

The "log" posted looks like an actual internal mailbox on the same server which sent the mail. Where did you find it? The mail came from local unix account sigma601 and was sent to the same account.
Just changing the "from" text in sendmail will not change the underlying email address but it can influence the way it is displayed in a mail reader. Masqureading an email address is a bit more complicated.

Do you have a external email relay server? If so, your local sendmail configuration will need to point non-local email to that server (the "DS" line in sendmail.cf) if it does not already do this.


Ps. What does "register in SMTP" mean in the context of your site?

Set the smart mail host in sendmail to the same ip/FQDN as your outbound server for email you send from your desktop.
Sendmail also requires a functional DNS.

Another problem you may have: Determine if remote client access is disabled. If the sendmail daemon process – sendmail -bd – is running with the “-C /etc/mail/local.cf” parameter, then remote client access is disabled.

ps -ef | grep sendmail

Set sendmail’s config/local_only property to false
svcs sendmail
STATE STIME FMRI
online 10:51:43 svc:/network/smtp:sendmail

svccfg -s /network/smtp:sendmail
svc:/network/smtp:sendmail> listprop config/local_only
config/local_only boolean true
svc:/network/smtp:sendmail> setprop config/local_only=false
svc:/network/smtp:sendmail> listprop config/local_only
config/local_only boolean false
svc:/network/smtp:sendmail> exit

Restart sendmail
svcadm restart /network/smtp:sendmail
ps -ef | grep sendmail