[ale] dialup and sendmail

[Joe Bayes]

Let me make sure I've got this straight...

I'm stuck behind a dial-up connection from cnmnetwork.com. I'm able to
send mail locally on my machine, and I'm able to send mail to users at
cnmnetwork.com. However, mail sent to anyone else on the 'net
disappears and is never heard from again. No bounce or anything, it
just doesn't arrive. 

I took the stock sendmail.cf which comes with RH 5.2, and modified the
entry: 

# "Smart" relay host (may be null)
DSsmtp:smtp.cnmnetwork.com

which, as I understand it, should deliver all non-local mail to
smtp.cnmnetwork.com, which will then handle fowarding it on to
wherever it's supposed to go. If I telnet smtp.cnmnetwork.com 25 and
send my message from there, it arrives as it should.

Before I changed the above entry in sendmail.cf, mail would accumulate
in /var/spool/mqueue, presumably because my machine was trying to
connect directly to the destination machine and the destination
machine wasn't about to promiscuously exchange bits with some piddley
dial-up machine. 

What am I doing wrong?

Another question: Why will random destinations exchange mail with
smtp.cnmnetwork.com, but not my machine? Those destinations don't know
who smtp.cnmnetwork.com is, any more than they know who I am, right?
(Does this have something to do with MX records?)

Here's an entry from /var/log/maillog:

Feb  4 14:32:12 spoo sendmail[3883]: OAA03881: to=jbayes at cs.oberlin.edu, ctladdr=root (0/0), delay=00:00:03, xdelay=00:00:02, mailer=smtp, relay=one.cnmnetwork.com. [209.79.28.34], stat=Sent (ok 918167348 qp 16076)

Thanks loads,

--joe