Hi Thomas, Thanks for your reply - it has made things clearer. The nullmailer makes a lot of sense, and I think I "get it".
I have exim4 installed (I'm lost on that). I type the command as above and the mail never arrives in my yahoo box. Do I need to tell it to go via the gateway or am I leagues off the point?
Not leagues, no. What you haven't said is whether the MTA is installed on your gateway box, or on your workstation. I'll assume it is installed on your workstation.
I'd tried both, but yes - the workstation.
It might well pay you to "revisit" the questions you would have answered via debconf when you installed exim4. The command:
# dpkg-reconfigure exim4
Seem to need: # dpkg-reconfigure exim4-config which seems unusual.
will do that. What you're wanting to do is probably just relay mail. To be perfectly honest, if you answer the questions properly, you won't have anything to worry about. They're there for a reason.
Yes, I had revisited dpkg-reconfigure a handful of times. I answered the questions sensibly. I have now discovered the problem!... This is a home network, but I needed to append a .com (or similar) to the "system mail name" in the config dialogue. My machine is called "desktop", and it was getting "501 syntax errors" from the yahoo smtp server (which I was blissfully unaware of as I was reading the wrong local mail - where the error messages were sitting). I now call it desktop.com in the dpkg-reconfigure dialogue and it works. I don't think this will cause a problem for the real desktop.com domain as I'm only sending mail from and to myself, but what's the proper way round this problem? Am I allowed to send mail if I don't have a domain to send from? I can now happily mail from either my desktop or gateway. I plan to get alerts from nagios now... A blinding bit of kit. Thanks for you help. -- Matt ___________________________________________________________ ALL-NEW Yahoo! Messenger - all new features - even more fun! http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com