By scanline on

Hello, I am a new user of drupal and have just finished setting up a site that I'll be expanding as I learn more about the software.

But right now I have a problem with users being able to create an account and get their password by email. Please read on, because it is NOT the simple 'sendmail not running' problem I've already found mentioned by searching the forum messages.

My problem occours at a different point. Sendmail is running, accepts the mail but THEN gets a message back from my local ISP that handles most of the mail accounts my users will be logging on with. If I send a passoword to myself, things go through my own mailserver (qmail on redhat 8) and I get it fine. It is only when trying to send mail to users not on my local network that things fail. Here is the exact error message I get back from the ISP's mail server, as logged in maillog:

Feb 10 14:05:58 MYSERVER sendmail[1309]: h1A95qMM001300: to=, ctladdr= (48/48), delay=00:00:00, xdelay=00:00:00, mailer=esmtp, pri=30415, relay=mx.MYISP.net. [ISP_ip_ADDRESS], dsn=5.6.0, stat=Data format error

Any thoughts?

Comments

scanline’s picture

scanline commented

Here is what was going on, in case anyone else searches for a solution to the same problem.

My mail daemon was using the name 'localhost.localdomain' when relaying the mail to the local ISP. This was being rejected with the unhelpful 'data format error' message.

I edited my /etc/hosts file so my server was sending the proper identification, and now it all appears to be working.

Anonymous’s picture

(not verified) commented

Thanks.

Anonymous’s picture

(not verified) commented

this error appears to be caused in several ways, most related to DNS
name service. A few:
1. if your sending machine does not have it's own name/IPaddress in
its /etc/hosts file, it will cause the upstream target/relay host
to reject the message with something which means: "I don't know who
you are". The sending MTA sendmail then issues the error in the
maillog "...dsn=5.6.0 stat=Data Format Error". The fix for this is
to have a correct /etc/hosts; like so:

# Internet host table...
#
127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost
199.11.241.5 havoc.epitomy.com havoc

... where the last line is replaced with your IP address and FQDN
(fully-qualified domain name)

2. your DNS server does not have an entry for you. Check to see
if you showup in the server tables by a query using either
dig or nslookup; ie: nslookup havoc.epitomy.com
If the reply comes back like this:
** server can't find havoc.epitomy.com NXDOMAIN
then the server does not have you in the table. You need to
contact your ISP/service provider and inquire as to why that is.

NOTE: the data "199.11.241.5 havoc.epitomy.com" is bogus of course;
replace with your correct data

Anonymous’s picture

(not verified) commented

If you are getting this error from a relay machine, it is likely
the host that originated the message has an incorrect domain name
in the "local-host-names" file.

umairsuri’s picture

umairsuri commented

getting similar error Data format error for one email add \ domain only when sending message via sendmail command however able to send message for the same email add\ domain when sending message with SWAKS after I updated /etc/hosts file as mentioned

if some one can advise and point me to the right direction to resolve the issue will be great.

Thanks in advance.