>anyways, care to post your /etc/mail/local-host-names?

basically it contains parts that appear on the right hand side of an '@' in an email address, so if I receive mail for 'rob@foo.bar.com' and 'another@xyz.net', then /etc/mail/local-hosts-names would contain:

foo.bar.com
xyz.net

AFAIK, this tells sendmail to deliver mail for these two domains to users on this machine, and not to try to find another machine (locally or on the net) that will accept the mail.

> im really having a hard time understanding
> how the heck domain names and host names are stored, passed around and resolved.

I don't think how those work is relevant to setting up sendmail as such. To change the behaviour of name resolving for email purposes, you need to look into 'MX' records for your domain, and chances are that it's your ISP that controls this and they probably offer no way for you to change this. If you've bought your own domain name then you probably do have control of your MX records, in which case you need to configure this via whatever service your domain name provider offers - that provider must have a place where you can give it the IP address of your machine (e.g. for www access) and it may also ask you for an IP address of your mail server.

Say you owned myname.com and have a single computer at home.
Run 'nslookup' (no flags)
Type myname.com at the '>' prompt, and you'll be told the IP address of your machine
Type "set querytype=MX"
Type "myname.com" again
You'll now be shown where email for myname.com gets sent.
Unless that matches your home computer, sendmail on that machine won't directly receive email sent to @myname.com

If you've been collecting email via POP (or similar) from an ISP then it's 90% likely that your mail will stay on your ISPs mailserver and not get delivered to your osx box. My ISP lets me collect via POP or receive the email via SMTP, so I can run sendmail and when I dial in, sendmail starts to receive new email that's been stored by my ISP. Check to see if your ISP offers SMTP delivery, if it does then you need to enable it to use sendmail. but make sure sendmail is working properly before switching on SMTP delivery.

I've heard that some ISPs will block the email port to prevent people running their own SMTP server.

Also note that having your own mail server can open you up to abuse from spammers. If you mess up the configuration, your email can also bounce without you noticing.

> here's a list of
>stuff ive done. all i know is that all my servers are working...finally.

>2. i never changed the ROUTER=-AUTOMATIC- <--looks like i should change this to my router address

Your networking obviously works, so don't change that setting. It's nothing to do with sendmail. Sorry if my mentioning it confused.

>5. ive tried setting the hostname -s in the terminal...this just reverts to localhost upon restart

don't bother using 'hostname'. It doesn't make a permanent change that survives reboots.

Thanks for helping me get sendmail working. I did everything that was suggested, and the final piece was waiting for DNS to update my domain name to my new IP number.

I'm sending and receiving!

Now if I could just get my SSH to work between machines....

damon