[ale] Sendmail Help HELP!

[Danny Cox]

Howdy, all!

	Yes, it's time to peer into the dark dragon of Sendmail, at least for
me.  It's doing something consistently (wrong!), and I'd like to know
how to fix it.

	This won't be a nutshell, but here goes anyway: at our company, we run
a service bureau.  Some reports we'd like to email our customers.  So,
we send the text file to an off-site server, which runs a daemon from
cron, finds the email in the file, and sends it.  Simple, huh?  Yeah, I
thought so too.

	The problem comes with any errors.  If it errors out for 3 times,
sendmail gives up.  But it emails the error message to the owner of the
process (admin in this case).  Admin runs many jobs, and attempting to
pick out these errors seemed an impossible task.

	Yesterday, I had the bright idea (yeah, right) of creating a new user,
and having admin sudo to that user (sbemail) to send the file.  There's
also a new alias in /etc/mail/aliases which maps sbemail to my email
(which is on a different server).  Again, not too bad and snaky, huh?

	I constructed a fake domain in the email file, re-queued it, and waited
on the email.  None came.  The log shows sendmail finding that the
domain doesn't exist.  The next entry shows a to: pointing correctly to
my email, the full domain of our MX handler (and it's correct IP), and
the sad refrain "dsn=5.0.0 Stat=Service unavailable".  This happens
EVERY time I try it.

	However, if I attempt an email on that machine to sbemail, I get it
EVERY time.

	After plunging (if you call that plunging) into some Sendmail docs, I
found that "dsn" is the Delivery Status Notification, which seems to
come as a part of the 'HELO' or 'EHLO' beginning chat to the MX server. 
But, I could be wrong.

	So, any ideas of why a direct email works, but an error email doesn't? 
Are there any configuration settings I might try (I did find the option
'ErrorMode', but that seems set correctly.  Any higher logging levels I
might try?

	Thanks loads!

-- 
kernel, n.: A part of an operating system that preserves the
medieval traditions of sorcery and black art.

Danny