Mutt and SMTP

[Stefano Ferri <stferri@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear folks,

this is the first time I post in this mailing list.
I am not a "real" system administrator but I had the chance
to be root on many Unix/Linux machines (usually machines
used for mathematical simulation with very few users, I am
a mathematician in real life), both Sun and x86.

I have used mutt for many years, usually with little or no
problems but recently I tried to set up mutt on a laptop to
be used with the pop and smtp servers of our university and
I had a hell of a time. I hope that some of you have the time
and the patience to read what I did and to help me. Possibly
the real problem is with the sendmail setting, I hope this
does not make this message OT.

This is what I did.

I am running Linux 2.6.9-11.EL, so mutt (1.4.1i) comes as a
part of the distribution.

I just started by adding the following lines to .muttrc

set mbox = $mypopserver
set pop_host = $mypopserver
set pop_user = my@address
set spoolfile = $mypopserver
set pop_pass="$my.mail.password"
set sendmail="/usr/sbin/sendmail"

This way I could read my mail but when I tried to send mail
it sometimes did not work. Namely, I could send mail to most
commercial addresses (like yahoo or gmail) but if I sent a
mail to myself or to collegues in other universities the
mail bounched back with a message saying that my mailer was
badly configurated.

I started to think that the problem was in the fact that
smtp was not properly accessed (but why did it work to yahoo
then?), so I changed the sendmail.mc file un-commenting the
following lines:

define(`SMART_HOST',`$mysmtpserver')
MASQUERADE_AS(`$mydomain')
FEATURE(masquerade_envelope)

I also changes the file access adding the following line:

AuthInfo:$mysmtpserver "U:me@address" "I:me@address" "P:my.mail.massword"

and run make from /etc/mail

It turned out that I did not have the sendmail-cf package.
I downloaded a version called sendmail 8.13.8.orig.tar.gz from

http://packages.debian.org/unstable/mail/sendmail-cf

This, unce gunzipped and untarred create a strange maze of directories:

/usr/local/sendmail-8.13.8/sendmail-8.13.8/cf/cf
from which I made make install-cf

It did not complain but now mutt...does nothing (I mean, I can
read but not send anything).

I then figured out that maybe the SSL certificate was the problem,
I went to /usr/share/ssl/certs and gave the command
make sendmail.pem which seemed to produce something.

However still cannot send mail...

If I try to send and then make ps -ef | grep sendmail I get the
following:

root      2190     1  0 08:10 ?        00:00:00 sendmail: accepting connections
smmsp     2198     1  0 08:10 ?        00:00:00 sendmail: Queue runner@01:00:00
for /var/spool/clientmqueue

Did any of you have any idea of what did I do wrong? Suggestions or
help?

Thank you in advance for your time.

Stefano