[thelist] configuring sendmail for relaying mail form data

Phil Turmel philip at turmel.org
Wed Oct 20 22:39:13 CDT 2004


John,

Before getting too hung up in sendmail delivery 
configuration (Ugh!), you might want to check whether the 
user account for the web server process (or CGI if 
applicable) is authorized to use an arbitrary sender 
address.  Your error message shows the sender as 
"www at domain.tld".  So "www" is your web server user account? 
If not, or if domain.tld is not the configured sendmail 
local host, you need extra priviledges.

A generic *nix user account can only send mail when "sender" 
is equal to their user account name @ the configured local 
host name.

HTH.

Phil Turmel

ps. <troll type="sendmail">I use exim instead of sendmail 
simply because its WAY easier to configure/understand for 
small servers.  So I can't help with actual configuration 
details....</troll>

John DeStefano wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I'm trying to use a good-looking but poorly-supported PHP form mail script
> (http://www.leveltendesign.com/L10Apps/Fm/) on a FreeBSD server to
> process data submitted by a Web mail form.
> 
> The installation test completed successfully, and I moved the PHP file
> into my Web site.  Now, when I click the submit button, I'm brought to
> the 'success' page, but an email is never received. This was also the
> case during the initial test, but I was brought to the default success
> page.
> 
> Despite the poor support, I don't think the script itself is the
> problem.  The mail server queue is holding these messages with the
> following error:
> 
> Deferred: 450 <www@<host>.<domain>.com>: Sender address rejected:
> Domain not found
> 
> The FreeBSD guide's Troubleshooting section points to the Sendmail FAQ
> for more information.  The Sendmail FAQ on this topic contains a cycle
> of links, but I get the idea that I need to configure sendmail to
> route messages via my ISP's SMTP gateway, and that I need to define a
> "smart host".
> 
> The most relevent FAQ entries I could find were:
> http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/mail-trouble.html#Q22.5.4.
> http://www.sendmail.org/faq/section3.html#3.22
> 
> So I added the following to /etc/mail/freebsd.mc:
> FEATURE(`accept_unresolvable_domains')dnl
> FEATURE(`accept_unqualified_senders')dnl
> 
> I also created /etc/mail/relay-domains and inserted every possible
> variation of domains I could think of.
> 
> I then restarted sendmail ('cd /etc/mail && make restart') and tried
> the form again, but mailq showed the same 450 error.
> 
> I added the following to /etc/mail/freebsd.mc:
> define('SMART_HOST', `smtp-server.rochester.rr.com')dnl
> 
> After a restart, mailq gave the same error.
> 
> Any sendmail gurus out there have thoughts on how to resolve this, or
> what I'm doing wrong?
> 
> Thanks.
> ~John


More information about the thelist mailing list