sendmail woes

[Charles Hallenbeck]

I have just upgraded my Slackware distro from 8.0 to 8.1 and have
everything working okay, except sendmail. I cannot get it to work
with the canned configurations, nor with one I compiled myself
(with Steve Holmes help).

I am really tempted to abandon sendmail for another smtp program
and I wonder what alternatives to sendmail others have used.

In case I am overlooking something obvious, here is the error
message I consistently get when running fetchmail to pull down
mail from my ISP. Sendmail does not work for outgoing mail
either.

In response to fetchmail:

2 messages for hallenbeck at mail.valstar.net (8519 octets).
reading message hallenbeck at mail.valstar.net:1 of 2 (2991 octets)
..fetchmail: SMTP error: 421 4.3.0 collect: Cannot write
./dfg8UISIMc001731 (bfcommit, uid=0, gid=25): Permission denied
 not flushed
reading message hallenbeck at mail.valstar.net:2 of 2 (5528 octets)
..fetchmail: SIGPIPE thrown from an MDA or a stream socket error
fetchmail: socket error while fetching from in.valstar.net
fetchmail: Query status=2 (SOCKET)
fetchmail: terminated with signal 13

----------

The error on the second message seems to be a side effect of the
first one. I get these two errors even if there are more than two
messages waiting.

So - what I need is - if you see something obvious here that will
help, I would appreciate knowing what it is. Or - if you use an
alternative to sendmail and can recommend it, I would like to
know about that too.

I am ready to sell this box and dust off my trusty abacus!

Chuck



-- 
The Moon is Waning Crescent (39% of Full)
So visit me at http://www.valstar.net/~hallenbeck