From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.76 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.2.19-6.2.1 i686) Description of problem: In a setup where my box is a relay only MX for 'otherdomain.com' mail is flowing fine from everywhere->myhost->otherdomain.com but does not go in the other direction: otherdomain.com->myhost->rest-of-the-world. I had the following lines in /var/log/maillog May 28 11:19:41 myhost sendmail[12697]: f4S8Jdk12697: timeout waiting for input from mail.otherdomain.com during message collect May 28 11:19:41 myhost sendmail[12697]: f4S8Jdk12697: from=<X.Y>, size=0, class=0, nrcpts=1, msgid=<200105280819.f4S8Jdk12697.com>, proto=ESMTP, daemon=Daemon0, relay=mail.otherdomain.com [1.2.3.4] May 28 11:19:41 myhost sendmail[12697]: f4S8Jdk12697: to=<xy>, delay=01:00:02, pri=30000, relay=yahoo.it., stat=timeout waiting for input during message collect You may notice two strange things in the log: 1) size is zero: this is "correct": I traced messages exchanged in the protocol and after EHLO ...... myhost there is the <<< DATA >>> 354 Enter mail, end with "." on a line by itself dialog that exits with timeout (and so size=0). 2) in the to=<...> line we have relay=yahoo.it. and not something like relay=host.yahoo.it. This is a visible simptom: in the sending phase relay= is always a domain, not an host. I don't understand why! How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. have two hosts: A and B, A cannot reach internet, B is his mail relay 2. describe this setup in DNS: A is higher precedence MX, B the other one 3. B also is the mail forwarder for A 4. send a mail from A to yourfriend Actual Results: A tries to send the mail to B but in the collect phase B has a timeout and does not get any data. Expected Results: mail from A delivered to yourfriend Additional info: Michael Abadjiev suggested to me that sendmail-8.11.2 is broken and to grab sources from sendmail-8.11.0 (RedHat 7.0); done, rebuild (on RH 7.1) and all went fine.
From your description I think that sendmails's behaviour is correct. You have to configure sendmail as relay for this domain and forward mail and you have to add another configuration that hosts within that domain can use your server as open email-relay for the rest of the world. Florian La Roche