Many thanks to Paul and Nix for their quick replies. smtp and squid are now closed ad working for me. In the end, I found out I could receive mail via fetchmail without using sendmail but divert mail to procmail instead. This has simplified things even more than the sendmail fix, Paul sent. I found out how to direct the Japanese canna sever to localhost but so far this has not worked for me. I have sent a note to the SUSE Japanese developer asking for information. It's probably something he should consider since SUSE has recently started supporting Japanese and there's probably going to be a lot of people running Japanese on SUSE that are unaware of the open canna port. thanks again, Joss p.s. I see from the list archives that back in January, mail from me to this list was the subject of a possible security issue. Rest assured, this was not anything except for my pure incompetence setting up sendmail. I tried to subscribe to the list before realising my sendmail was not set up properly. If I remember correctly, my application to the list was immediately rejected. I then spent far too long learning how to set up sendmail after that ;-) Sorry to have got this list involved in my incompetence.