get sendmail to stop "Connecting to ... via relay" and go direct

[gebarnes]

I've installed Fedora 9 and mail doesn't work any more. I just want to send. I use fetchmail to receive. So all I want is a working submit.cf (or submit.mc).

I do "mail -v <addresss>" and it says the following. How do I get it to stop trying to use some sort of relay and go direct to smtp.comcast.net? (or at least make it tell me what it thinks it is doing after the "...". It never completes.)

Gary

[root@gebhome mail]# mail -v garynot@comcast.net
Subject: test
again
Cc:
garynot@comcast.net... Connecting to smtp.comcast.net via relay...

[rnbguy]

hi did you figure this out?

[gebarnes]

Yes, eventually. It seems that with the latest sendmails that you always have to have a local daemon. Sigh. It can be configured so that it only accepts mail from local (on the machine) users so at least it won't become part of a spam cloud.
I had to modify sendmail.mc (it won't work to hack the .cf file, don't know why but that easy way of doing things has apparenlty also disappeared). You have to install sendmail-cf-8.14.2-4.fc9.i386.rpm in order to be able to do the "make" in /etc/mail. Apparently that is not installed by default. I made these changes:
define(`SMART_HOST', `smtp.g.comcast.net')dnl
MASQUERADE_AS(`comcast.net')dnl
And that made it work. Your comast smtp server may have a different name. Do "ping smtp" and see what you get. Then a few months later comcast apparently changed their IPV6 setup (why this affects sendmail on an IPV4-only client you'd have to ask the sendmail folks) and they did it "wrong" in a way that is apparently common among IPV6 folks. So mail stopped working. I eventually found this thanks to Google which I added at the very end of the sendmail.mc:
define(`confBIND_OPTS', `WorkAroundBrokenAAAA')dnl
Note the backtick (`) and the apostrophe (') characters. That made comcast work again.
Gary