SUMMARY: sendmail problem?

From: Dave Cain (cain@athena.syrres.com)
Date: Mon May 06 1996 - 08:14:12 CDT


In short, the concensus seems to be that my system(s) have
sendmail configured correctly.

"sendmail -v -bv" verifies the address in two ways:

1. If it's a local address, it checks for the existance of that
user, and hence a full delivery of email.

2. If it's a remote address, it only parses the email address,
and doesn't bother to check and see if that system/domain, and user
exist.

If you want to see if a remote email address is deliverable,
you need to:
1. Ping, nslookup, etc. the system/domain to be
sure it exists.

2. Telnet or mconnect to the mail port, and use the
vrfy command to check if the user exists.

Several people noted that nobody@nobody.com is
in fact a real e-mail address (guess I should have
verified this address first). Still, my systems report
deliverable mail for email address that DEFINITELY
do not exist (e.g. joe@joe.com, hi@fake.com).

Thanks to all that contributed.

----------
From: Dave Cain[SMTP:cain@athena.syrres.com]
Sent: Friday, May 03, 1996 4:24 PM
To: 'sun-managers@ra.mcs.anl.gov'
Subject: sendmail problem?

You'll have to forgive my ignorance of sendmail, but one
of the Sun manuals says you can test whether mail can
be delivered to a recipient by:

sendmail -v -bv recipient

and if you get a "...deliveable message" it can.

So tell me if I'm using I am using sendmail wrong or if
I have a problem with my sendmail configuration:

When I say:

sendmail -v -bv nobody@nobody.com

(obviously a ficticious (sp?) email address), I get:

nobody@nobody.com... deliverable

I get the same response on several SunOS 4.1.X,
Solaris 2.x, and a UnixWare boxes. Is this right, or do I have a
problem with my e-mail.

- Dave



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