[plug] Small office email problems

[Richard Henry]

While I don't have any extensive experience setting up sendmail, something
that does spring to mind is that I believe sendmail will have problems with
timeouts if your PPP gateway machines' firewall is dropping packets sent to
port 113 from your mail server (mail.bigpond.com).

Check whether your firewall is DROP'ing 113 packets, or REJECT'ing them
(that's iptables terminology, don't know if ipchains is different).  If it
is set to drop, you need to set it to reject.  This *may* fix it.  I think
that when sendmail connects to a mail server, the server will often try and
do a reverse auth check on 113, and if you are simply dropping packets it
will wait for a timeout before continuing.

I could be totally wrong, I can't remember where I read this.

Rich.

> I set up accessability to mail.bigpond.com by adding a MASQ 
> rule to ipchains forwarding.  I have not set up an MTA.  The 
> setup works for test files but appears to time out with 
> typical (30 KB) emails, with all clients using Win98 and Outlook 2k.
> 
> There appears to be two approaches to get email to work - 
> overcome the MASQ timeout issue (if that's really what the 
> problem is) or set up sendmail to
> (hopefully) overcome timeout issues.