][ wrote:

Hi,

I wasn't able to use sendmail recently. I've now track it down that the hostname that my Sendmail uses is wrong. How can I fix it?

% /usr/sbin/sendmail -bi WARNING: local host name (;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached) is not qualified; see cf/README: WHO AM I? /etc/mail/aliases: 24 aliases, longest 10 bytes, 233 bytes total

% grep 'WHO AM I' -r /etc/mail/* || echo no found no found

Please help.

FYI, this is the respond that I got explaining why it is happening.

---

You seem to be a victim of the same broken "helpfulness" as described in the (apparently misthreaded by google) thread at

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.mail.sendmail/browse_frm/thread/7095fe4c...

• i.e. some install script or whatever has "configured" your sendmail

with a *host name* of literally ";; connection timed out; no servers could be reached"! This is actually an error message from the 'dig' command - i.e. the script probably tries to use 'dig' to get the fully-qualified host name, and blindly accepts any output from 'dig'. The slightly different greeting comes from the fact that sendmail inserts the "ESMTP" there as the second word, under the reasonable assumption that the host name is a single word... _________________________________________________________________

This might seem obvious, but did you make sure your mail server has a PTR record for it's IP? If not, make sure your mail server has a PTR record in DNS and do a dpkg-reconfigure -plow sendmail.