Outgoing mail is working again

While investigating user login issues, I realized that we were not sending email from any of our sites (ourmedia.org, tools.ourmedia.org, etc). This mainly effects the emails for registration and password changes.

Since we use google for ourmedia.org email handling, our webserver had never been set up to allow outgoing smtp messages except from it's specific outhink.com subdomain. I added ourmedia.org to the etc/hosts file and restarted sendmail. This seemed to do the trick.

The following articles were helpful in understanding the issue. In the end, it does not appear that the value of the "from" email matters (e.g., I am using inquery at ourmedia.org for that site and ourmedia at spinxpress.net for this one).

• http://www.linuxhomenetworking.com/wiki/index.php/Quick_HOWTO_:_Ch21_:_Configuring_Linux_Mail_Servers
• http://drupal.org/node/17603
• http://drupal.org/node/67202

At some point, it might be nice to check out the <a href='http://drupal.org/node/35189'>Drupal SMTP Authentication Support module</a> and see if it might be useful in hooking up with our Google service.

(image from http://www.flickr.com/photos/brandylee/209473234/)