[Balug-talk] Email/forwarding issues w/ linux, sendmail

[Eric Yoon]

With the help of this forum (many thanks to those of
you who have offered me advice in the past) I am
building a web site on a RH9 Linux server that, among
other things, offer users the ability to set up
accounts and forwarding addresses.  Members only have
knowledge of each other's forwarding address; when
they send an email to such an address, my server
receives it, reformulates the email to replace the
recipient's forwarding address (the To: line) with his
real address, removes the sender's real address (in
the Reply-To: and From: lines) and replaces them with
the sender's forwarding address.  In this way, members
can communicate with one another, and yet never have
to reveal their real email address.  

In testing my email system recently, I discovered a
peculiar thing.  If I perform the following simple
command at the command prompt:

# mail amaterasu2915 at yahoo.com

I can send an email easily enough and the email is
received at the Yahoo account.  However, I noticed
that if I try to send email to certain other domains,
such as [name]@stanfordalumni.org or
[name]@eastmatch.com, I get a returned mail and the
following error message embedded in the returned mail:

 (reason: 550 <root at 62.31.74.165>: Sender address
rejected: Domain not found)

or

 (reason: 553 Invalid sender)

What could the problem be?  I am guessing that perhaps
my outgoing email is being detected as spam, since the
sender's domain at this time is merely numerical (i.e.
instead of domain.com, it is 62.31.74.165 or something
like that.)  Hence, would the program be fixed if I
merely use a domain that is pointed to my IP address? 
Or must something else be done?  If a spam shield is
indeed the problem, do people have advice on how I
might avoid being blocked, while still allowing me to
provide email anonymity as described above?  

Any advice would be very much appreciated.  Thank you!

Eric
Beginner Linux/mySQL/PHP/Sendmail User



		
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