I run my own home mail server avoiding many of the mail problems experienced by my ISP (they were using @home). Now they are hosting their own servers. All was working just fine until last week when mail being sent from home to accounts on their system bounced (my wife likes to use her isp account in the from field). It turns out that they have quietly turned on authentication. It was easy enough to fix by turning this on in my win email clients and pointing outgoing mail to their mail server instead of my own. However, I now have two questions: 1. is there a way that I can enable sendmail on my own server to authenticate with my isp's server and go back to using my own server for outgoing mail? I have set up sendmail authentication for LOGIN PLAIN but am lost on what to do next. 2. now that I've enabled authentication on my own sendmail server it was easy to turn on authentication in the win mail clients (a couple of mouse clicks) but I can't work out how to do the same with pine on my linux systems? Gerry -- "The lyfe so short, the craft so long to learne" Chaucer