[Techtalk] Mutt O'phobia

[Siobhan Elliott]

On Wed, Mar 26, 2003 at 02:05:17PM -0500, anti_tanvir at yahoo.co.uk wrote:
> On Tue, 2003-03-25 at 17:09, Siobhan Elliott wrote:
> > Hi,
> > Does anything appear in your mail log (I don't use Red Hat anymore
> > but it should be /var/log/maillog) when you try to send mail?
> > Are you able to send mail straight from the command line, i.e.:
> > $ mail some_address at yahoo.com
> > Subject: test test
> > test
> > .
> > Cc: 
> > $
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I could solve the problem!!!! I can now receive and send mails using
> mutt. Thanks for letting me know about the logfile. I noticed
> tcp_wrapper was blocking the mails. So, I had to comment out the lines:
> 
> ALL:ALL in hosts.deny and ALL:local in hosts.allow. Do you know any way
> around this? I mean this is quite dangerous commenting out those two
> lines.

tcp wrappers works by looking first at hosts.allow file, then
looks at hosts.deny if there is no matching rule. You should be able to
put the following line in hosts.allow :

sendmail: <YOUR COMPUTER NAME OR IP ADDRESS>

to allow connections to sendmail, then uncomment the ALL:ALL in
hosts.deny. (see man hosts.allow and man
hosts.deny for more info).

> Another thing is that, when I send mails from the colsole..the receiver
> gets the From: header as user_name at localhost.localdomain. Is it because
> of the entry in the /etc/hosts file? 

Right, you'll get that if you have not set your own hostname for your
computer. If you have a domain name you want to use for your
machine, IIRC on Red Hat you set your hostname by editing /etc/hosts
(see man hosts) and in /etc/sysconfig/network put

HOSTNAME=<YOUR DESIRED COMPUTER NAME>

--
L Siobhan Elliott
Email: siobhan at spiderland.net / AIM: chordchemist999
http://www.spiderland.net (under construction)