UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

that's the equipment. There's one single mail server for smtp. It's got a permanent Internet connection so it doesn't need to relay or forward mails to an outstanding mailsever. It should directly send the mails to the addressed domains.

My ISP set my two DNS Primary and secondary as usual.

that's the whole stuff.

I think your right about the dns problems. It isn't directly on dns resolving. but sendmail needs for sending to diffrent domains through itself as fqdn. The errors refers to mailhost.mydomain.com, what isn't already defined in my dns, so sendmail couldn't find it, actually itself.
I dont know why but there are two dffrent cases about sendmail, I guess.

a) send mail to local domain. It don't look for mailhost.whatever.com, just localhost. No dns query!

b) ougoing mail to a differnt domain. Look for dns entrie on its own domain in dns - mailhost.domain.com what it couldn't find, so the fatal error happend and breaks at mailhost.mydomain.com host unknown!

Is my idea possible?

I don't know why sendmail needs to look for itself dns entrie to resolv itself.

Your details are not sufficient. To solve the problem we need the complete details. For example: What is the FQDN of the machine where you are to trying to configure sendmail ?

Just this FQDN would be a great help ..... thanks

fqdn is sharkms.ch . but the domain is inactive. why is this a great help? anyway, any help is good!

Because of this:

Code:

server# nslookup
> set type=ANY
> sharkms.ch
Server:         64.23.27.23
Address:        64.23.27.23#53

** server can't find sharkms.ch.: NXDOMAIN

So, it is not possible to send any mail to sharkms.ch because it is not working in DNS properly as a FQDN.

What is the nameserver IP address for sharkms.ch ? We will check this for MX records and other problems (if possible...)

I set up the dns server, in a few hours should be all up! But why do I need this just for using smtp? For pop3 is clear! To resovl the server itself can be harcoded in host, isn't it?

From the FAQS on Sunsolve:

The dns is set up with the domain for my server but now I go this message by testing sendmail... does anyone know why sendmail defferes the message?

thanks!!
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# /usr/lib/sendmail -v p.knecht@2wire.ch < /etc/hosts
p.knecht@2wire.ch... Connecting to mailhost.sharkms.ch. via relay...
p.knecht@2wire.ch... Deferred: Connection refused by mailhost.sharkms.ch.