Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 75167
Sendmail attempts to connect to localhost.com, does not send mail
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:47:10 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.0.1) Gecko/20020830 Description of problem: I have configured sendmail to accept and send mail, but when I try to send mail using pine or any other local mail reader, nothing happens. Further investigation has shown that when I attempt to send mail using my mail server, it attempts to connect to a mail server on localhost.com for some strange reason. Predictably, the operation times out and the mail never gets sent. Of course, then sendmail tries to send an error message to the attempted sender of the message, with the same result: it tries to connect to localhost.com and fails. The end result is a large amount of files in /var/spool/clientmqueue and no sent messages. I have been using Red Hat as a mail server since 6.2, and have never had this problem before; perhaps it has to do with the recent restructuring in the way sendmail operates. Sendmail still receives mail fine from anywhere. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Attempt to send mail, from anyone, to anyone. Actual Results: The mail doesn't get sent; sendmail attempts to connect to localhost.com and fails; /var/spool/clientmqueue continues storing the message. Expected Results: The mail should have been sent; sendmail shouldn't have connected to localhost.com. Additional info: MDeferred: Connection timed out with localhost.com.
I have found out some new information about this bug that almost certainly connects it to bug 71906. Contrary to my earlier report, sendmail does not attempt to connect to "localhost.com"; it attempts to connect to "localhost.com.". (Notice the extra dot on the end.) An extremely dirty hack is to add the text "127.0.0.1 localhost.com." to /etc/hosts. Interestingly, adding "127.0.0.1 localhost.com" to /etc/hosts does not do anything.
I get exactly the same problem. For me, it says "localhost.cantara.com.", because I set Cwcantara.com in sendmail.mc. The /etc/hosts trick worked for me. I'll be very curious to see why this happens...
I had a similar problem. It turns out that I had in my resolv.conf file the following line: search gc (gc was some old domain). When I removed it suddenly all my queued mail was sent. The same configuration used to work under RedHat 7.3; I have no idea why it stopped functioning with 8.0.
I believe I am having the same problem. I did a fresh install of RH 8 and didn't make any changes to sendmail. I am thinking I should be able to send mail locally but no, I get the same errors as above. I tried adding 'localhost.localdomain.' in my /etc/hosts file but it didn't fix it. Any tips would be appreciated.
One thing you can do is add "localhost.com." to your /etc/hosts file. Another thing that I just discovered that works is changing a line directly in your /etc/mail/submit.cf file. The line for me is #112 on my system; it originally says "D{MTAHost}[localhost]". I changed it to "D{MTAHost}[127.0.0.1]". That will act as a substitute for modifying your /etc/hosts file. It's still a hack, but in my opinion it's a less dirty one.
I have changed MTAHost in the newest rpm. Please try out http://people.redhat.com/laroche/sendmail-8.12.3 and open up a new bugzilla report if that version is still having problems for you. greetings, Florian La Roche