UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

First of all, Happy Holidays,Merry Xmas, Happy Hanakah, Happy Kwanzaa, Happy Mid Winter Festival, etc.(Forgive me if I left your holiday out)

Anyway, here is my situation. I am setting up an email server at the job, and Sendmail is not cooperating. The error that I get on my RedHat 7.3 Dell PowerEdge 22500 is that /etc/sendmail.cf cannot open "line 88:cannot open /etc/mail/local-host-names: World writable directory" and"line 513: cannot open /etc/mail/trusted-users: World writable directory".
First, I checked the permissions for both files and even gave both of them the "chmod 777 <filename>" command, but that did not do anything. I rebuilt /etc/sendmail.cf a couple of times with the m4 macroprocessor, after checking /etc/mail/sendmail.mc to see if it looked alright, but that was no go. I even changed the name of the files in /etc/sendmail.cf from /etc/mail/local-host-names to /home/jstewart/local-host-names(I did remember to touch those files in /home/jstewart) and the same for /etc/mail/trusted-users.
This is quite frustrating, as many of you can identify with me. Can anyone offer any advice/give me a good website to look up the solution?
Again, Happy,uh Whatever and Happy New Year!!!

If /etc/mail is world-writable, then anyone can remove the file /etc/mail/trusted-users and then install a new file /etc/mail/trusted-users.

In this case "cannot" does not mean that the kernel would disallow the open, it means that sendmail itself is disallowing the operation.

Set the directory to 755 rather than 777. Expect sendmail to complain that you set the files to 777 next. It wants to be sure that the files must have been created by root.

And for a web site that will help you - Sendmail (link to directory permissions) FAQ

After changing the directory permissions to 755, then to 640, and finally, uninstalling and reinstalling Sendmail-8.11.6-15 and trying to start sendmail with permissions at 644, I am still coming up with the same message. However, this time, in addition to writing down the error message, I have also wrote down the error #, which is 451 4.0.0. The whole message reads 451 4.0.0 line 88 Cannot open /etc/mail/local-hosts-name: World writable directory
451 4.0.0 line 513 Cannot open /etc/mail/trusted-users: World writable directory

I have tried directory permissions 755, 640, and 644.

Any other suggestions??

Please post the output from the following commands:

/usr/lib/sendmail -d0.1 -bt < /dev/null
ls -ld /etc/mail
ls -l /etc/mail

The correct settings for directory persmissions on the mail directory were specified by Perderabo and in the link I provided.

For info specific to Redhat:
Redhat Sendmail permissions
Redhat Mail Servers

I went ahead and upgraded the server to RedHat 8.0, and the email seems to work fine now. The default permissions for the files in /etc/mail were as Perderabo and RTM had specified, so that leads to believe that the Sendmail program on 7.3 was corrupt or something(???). I don't know, really.

The only thing I know for sure is that it works now. Thanks for your help anyway, guys.