"m. d. walker" <mwalker@en.com> writes:

>I'm having a heck of a time getting my email programs to work with NetBSD
>1.3.2. I have a ppp connection which I can verify with ping, traceroute,
>and netstat -r. What I cannot do is receive or send mail via pine (3.96) or
>with mail.
>
>My etc/hosts file has the entry:
>204.89.181.1     en.com
>which is their correct IP address.
>
>I have the daemons sendmail and inetd started on boot.
>
>I have no idea what the line:
>"WARNING: local host name () is not qualified; fix $j in config file"
>is referring to.

The warning message is from Sendmail -- what it's saying is that
Sendmail can't figure out what the local domain of your machine
is.  (NOT your ISP--the domain of the box sitting in front of
you....)  A band-aid fix woud be to edit /etc/sendmail.cf and fill
in that variable...and probably also to turn on Masquerading.  (ie
masquerading as your ISPs name -- otherwise, if your local machine
name is 'bob', you e-mail will have 'your_name@bob' in the reply/from
fields of a message....which will obviously not work.

The other negative effect if band-aiding.  It's possible to set
things up so that mail send to 'another_user@your_ISP' results in
sendmail attempting to deliver locally...bouncing because 'another_user'
is unknown.

Also be aware that by default, masquerading works only on the
message and not envelope.  In other words, the reply-to field will
be <mwalker@en.com>, but the first line of the message header will
still be your local machine name.  Some mail programs label this
as <From: > some say <Return-Path: >.

You may run into problems when sending mail to an ISP who does a
DNS trace on the envelope (domain name in line 1 of full header)
-- AOL is one -- which will bounce if the lookup fails.  One possible
solution, which may or may not be appropriate for your specific
situation, is to use m4 to recompile sendmail.cf so that it
masquerades both the message AND the envelope.

Ultimately, what it appears that you must to is to resolve a local
DNS misconfiguration issue.  One place to start -- make sure you
have a machine and domain name entered in /etc/rc.conf, and give
yourself a loopback address in etc/hosts (ie - 127.0.0.1).  Also
make your machine a secondary mail server, giving it a lower priority
than your ISP.

Reccomended reading -- the Networking How-To's. RFCs 1912 and 1033
were quite helpful to me as well.

Did you ever think that something as simple as e-mail could be so
darn complex? :-)