deastwood, I think you are being a little unfair to the "experts". Setting up a mail server is not a "one size fits all" situation. There are many factors that could explain the same problem. Let's take your problem for example. You say you cannot mail to the outside world. Am I to assume you can receive mail? Do you have dns "A" and "MX" records for your mail server. Some linux distros that come with sendmail will allow you to send mail out but not recieve because of security issues. You may need to set up your firewall to allow traffic on port 25. If your distro was built with the tcpwrapper then you will need to add the line "sendmail: ALL" to /etc/hosts.allow. None of these are sendmail issues. Some distros will also add this line to /etc/mail/sendmail.mc:
DAEMON_OPTIONS(`Port=smtp,Addr=127.0.0.1, Name=MTA')
If you have this line, it is telling send mail to only look on the loopback device (localhost) for mail. You need to comment out this line, delete it or change the 127.0.0.1 to your internet or intranet ip depending on your network setup. If you want to be able to relay mail from a remote location through your server, you will need to add this line to sendmail.mc:
FEATURE('relay_local_from')
This will tell sendmail to relay if the from address is user@yourdomain.com and is a valid with valid password on your system. Once you are done editing sendmail.mc you need to rebuild the .cf file with the following command:
m4 /etc/mail/sendmail.mc > /etc/sendmail.cf
before sendmail will relay any mail through your server, you need to edit /etc/access and add the following line:
yourdomain.com RELAY
Then you need to build access.db using the following command:
makemap hash /etc/mail/access < /etc/mail/access
Once you are done doing this, you should be able to use your server just as you would your ISP mail account. If you find editing all these files a pain, you might want to try WebMin from
and give that a try. It is a GUI for setting up all your servers and your system in general.
