I am trying to set up a simple sendmail smtp relay server but I am having some problems. It is a apt-get Debian package install. First, no matter what I do to the access or access.db files sendmail still starts seemingly with no changes. If I delete or rename access.db it still starts. If I type gibberish into the access file and try to remake access.db with 'make access.db' it still creates a new file with no warnings! Second, I do not know exactly what to put into the access file to make it do what I want it to do, even if sendmail did pay attention to my changes. What I want it to do is to not accept any incoming mail at all, and relay mail from three different domains, and preferably only from a single email address in each of them. It also must not pay any attention to the IP of the computer it is relaying from.

I'm not great with Linux to begin with, let alone something as complex as sendmail so simple, detailed instructions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

It may be that your sendmail.cf wasn't generated with support for the access functionality. See if you get a similar output from the following grep:

The line "FEATURE(`access_db',`hash -T<TMPF> -o /etc/mail/access.db')dnl" should be in the sendmail.mc file used to generate the sendmail.cf file. I don't know whether you can add the support by hand or whether there are other necessary parts of the file. I always generate the cf file from the mc file.

I have the FEATURE access_db in my sendmail.mc file and have recreated the sendmail.mc file and restarted sendmail and have rebuilt my /etc/mail/access.db file, but sendmail still seems to ignore the addresses in the access file/database.

When I send to an address that is listed in the access db, it still goes through without any problems. I have trimmed the access file down to just a list of addresses to block. The format of my access entries is:

spammer@host.net ERROR:"550 Blocked by AU ITS"

Any ideas as to what else to check to get this working?