Hi there. I have a problem with my sendmail server. This is sitting behind a firewall with the SMART host configured as my ISP's mail server. I can send mail out, I can receive mail. So whats the problem?

The problem is that my ISP has told me that my sendmail box is acting as an open relay. I have configured /etc/mail/access and told it that the only hosts who can relay are those within the internal LAN. Then I type make to make the access.db database. This is the way I have setup Sendmail at other customers sites and it works perfectly.

I have noticed that when I vi /etc/mail/access the machine tells me that there is another file of the same name running as access.swp I'm still a relative newbie to Linux but I would take it from this message that there is the same file in swap. Maybe I,m wrong?!? How do I delete the access.swp file from within the swap? I'm prerrt certain this is confusing sendmail and is the only reason I why the machine is acting as an SMTP open relay. As I've said I have setup sendmail up in exactly the same way at another site and, as far as the ISP is concerned, this sendmail server at the other site is not an open relay. The only difference is the access.swp in swap.

Maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree here. Can somebody please shed some light on this for me? Any help would be much appreciated.

The access.swap has nothing to do with your open relay problem. You should check the contents of access again and recreate the access.db using makemap. You can delete the access.swap btw with just a rm ... the file has been created because of a vi session that didn't successfully exit or something alike ...

Thanks markus! ok I'll check the contents of access again! Just out of curiousity where would the access.swap file be? I know that might sound pretty dumb but do I have to be in a certain directory to delete it?