Sendmail Not handeling bad e-mail addresses

[beye1850]

Hello All.

I recently set up my sendmail server and everything is working fine. So i decided to try to send an e-mail to a bad address to see if the sendmail server would return a message to me stating that the address was bad. However what happens is the e-mail sits in the queue and every hour the sendmail server tries to resend it and I get this error in syslog

Jul 17 08:33:41 myserver sendmail[1289]: g6FFULWS010937: to=<fformway@ggffds.com>, delay=1+21:03:02, xdelay=00:00:00, mailer==esmtp, pri=4590954, relay=mail.myserver.com., dsn=4.0.0, stat=Deferred: Connection timed out with mail.myserver.com.

Anyone have any clue what is going on?

 

[Butterfly123]

Change the maximum number of retries in the sendmail.cf file..

Regds,

- Hemant
Networking and Systems Integration Group
Satyam Computer Services Ltd

 

[crasho2001]

Hi,
Check your sendmail daemon.
For example my sendmail daemon is working with -bd and -q15m parameters.

sendmail -bd -q15m

As I know; -q15m means sendmail tries to resend all saved messages in queue.

 

[Valcor]

By looking at the error message, it doesn't even know if the user is bad yet. All it seems to be able to find out is that the mail server you're trying to send to is refusing it's connection. That is why you are seeing repeated attempts at sending it. If the user wasn't found, sendmail would send you an immediate failure notice stating that fact. But as the mail server cannot connect, it'll keep attempting until the set timeout limit is reached. --
Jon

 

[Butterfly123]

Well, as per Jon, the target server will ofcourse throw the mail back if the user is not existing on that server (bad user).. The message u r getting in ur syslog file clearly shows that the target server is refusing the connection.. not a bad address.. - Hemant
Networking and Systems Integration Group
Satyam Computer Services Ltd

 

[rouse01]

I had a few messages backed up with the deferred status, but when I executed a etc/rc.d/init.d/sendmail restart, the queue cleared out fine. I'm not sure why they got stuck in the first place. Maybe because I was futzing around with procmail recipies.
Hope that helps.