I've been running Linux for a few months now, and usually when I've had a problem I could read the man pages and online resources and get it. But with sendmail, no such luck.

All I want to do is send email from the command line. My impression is that I have to do it through another server (in my case, my SBC Yahoo DSL server), since emails I send straight from my box will usually get rejected as spam. If that's wrong, I'm happy to just send them through some server on my own machine -- whatever works.

I'm running Mandrake 10.0, I got sendmail 8.12.11 and sendmail-cf installed and have spent a lot of time messing with the sendmail.mc file, following the instructions from multiple sites:

http://www.urbanophile.com/arenn/hac...h-sbc-dsl.html
http://www.whoopis.com/howtos/sendma...tml#mandrake10
http://www.dslreports.com/faq/11247

I put the server's SMTP address in brackets in the SMART_HOST definition and did everything they said, I make sure to run the m4 command and restart sendmail every time I change sendmail.mc, I've generated the authinfo.db file, and yet I still get the same error message every time.

This is the output I get when I do: mail -v nobody@nowhere.com . I don't type any of it in -- this all happens automatically, leaving me quite bewildered.

Code:
WARNING: local host name (localhost) is not qualified; fix $j in config file
nobody@nowhere.com... Connecting to [localhost] via relay...
220 localhost ESMTP Sendmail 8.12.11/8.12.11; Wed, 8 Dec 2004 01:32:34 -0800
>>> EHLO localhost
250-localhost Hello localhost [127.0.0.1], pleased to meet you
250 ENHANCEDSTATUSCODES
>>> MAIL From&#58;<root@localhost>
550 5.0.0 Access denied
root... Using cached ESMTP connection to &#91;localhost&#93; via relay...
>>> RSET
250 2.0.0 Reset state
>>> MAIL From&#58;<>
550 5.0.0 Access denied
postmaster... Using cached ESMTP connection to &#91;localhost&#93; via relay...
>>> RSET
250 2.0.0 Reset state
>>> MAIL From&#58;<>
550 5.0.0 Access denied
Closing connection to &#91;localhost&#93;
>>> QUIT
221 2.0.0 localhost closing connection
I can't make much sense of this, but it looks to me like the program somehow never reaches the external SMTP server. A friend suggested I might need to change my hostname or something, but I'm basically stumped.

If there's any other information that would be valuable, just ask and I'll post it ASAP. Thanks in advance for any help.[/url][/code]